Wolf
The aspect of the wolf provides the senses and the attacks of the mighty wolf, whose instincts are honed to track and take down its prey.
Minor Form: You gain the scent ability with a range of 10 feet, or, if you have the scent ability, the range increases by 10 feet. The range of this scent or the increase to your scent increases to 20 feet at 8th level and 30 feet at 15th level. The range doubles if the opponent is upwind and is halved if the opponent is downwind.
Major Form (beast shape II): Your shape changes to that of a dire wolf [+4 Str, -2 dex, +4 NA]. While in this form, you gain a base speed of 50 feet, low-light vision, scent (30 feet), a bite attack (1d8 damage), and you can make a trip attempt with your bite attack. At 8th level, the range of your scent ability increases to 40 feet and you gain a +4 racial bonus on Survival checks when tracking with scent. At 15th level, you gain Improved Natural Attack (bite).
Alternate Natural Attacks: Bite (B, P, S)).
Orchid
Female Garuda-Blooded Aasimar Shifter 4
NG Medium Humanoid (Human) / Outsider (Native)
STATISTICS
Str 16 (+3) [14 base, +2 racial]
Dex 18 (+4) [15 base, +2 racial, +1 @4]
Con 14 (+2)
Int 10 (+0)
Wis 16 (+3) [14 base, +2 racial]
Cha 8 (-1)
FEATS Weapon Finesse [Level 1]: With a light weapon, rapier, whip, or spiked chain made for a creature of your size category, you may use your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier on attack rolls. If you carry a shield, its armor check penalty applies to your attack rolls.
Shifter's Edge [Level 3]: Whenever you use Weapon Finesse to make a melee attack with your claws or a natural attack augmented by your claws, and you use your Dexterity bonus on attack rolls and your Strength modifier on damage rolls, you also add half your shifter level to the damage.
TRAITS Sandru’s Younger Sibling (Campaign): As a younger sibling to one of Sandpoint’s more influential citizens, you share some of that NPC’s innate talent and skill at adventuring. If you’re Sandru’s younger sibling, your hearty constitution gives you a +1 trait bonus on all Fortitude saving throws. In addition, you gain a +1 trait bonus on all attack rolls against foes that threaten your older sibling.
Beastkin (Social): Select one specific type of animal (Wolves). You were raised from infancy by an animal or pack of animals of that type. You learned their ways and have more in common with your beastly kin than members of any humanoid race. You gain a +1 trait bonus on Survival checks and can use speak with animals as a spell-like ability at will to communicate with the type of animal that raised you. ('Horse' added via Linguistics.)
Survivor (Regional): You gain a +1 trait bonus to initiative and Sense Motive checks. Sense Motive is always a class skill for you.
Unlearned (Drawback): You have always had difficulty learning and retaining information, and know very little about the world beyond the obvious and what pertains to your profession. Choose one Knowledge skill (Knowledge Nature). You cannot attempt untrained Knowledge checks with any other Knowledge skills, even if the check’s DC is 10 or lower. If you have access to a library that covers a specific Knowledge skill, you may attempt an untrained Knowledge check with a –2 penalty.
LANGUAGES
Common, Druidic, Skald, Tien.
Speak With Animals (Wolves, Horses) at will.
EQUIPMENT
Masterwork Hide Shirt (170gp)
Spear (2gp)
Shifters Kit: This includes a backpack, a bedroll, a belt pouch, a flint and steel, iron pot, mess kit, rope, trail rations (5 days), and a waterskin. (8gp)
1681 gold 3 silver 8 copper
SPECIAL ABILITIES Celestial Resistance: Aasimars have acid resistance 5, cold resistance 5, and electricity resistance 5.
Scion of Humanity: Some aasimars’ heavenly ancestry is extremely distant. An aasimar with this racial trait counts as an outsider (native) and a humanoid (human) for any effect related to race, including feat prerequisites and spells that affect humanoids. She can pass for human without using the Disguise skill. This racial trait replaces the Celestial language and alters the native subtype.
Truespeaker: There are some aasimars whose language transcends all boundaries. They gain a +2 bonus on Linguistics and Sense Motive checks, and they learn two languages each time they gain a rank in Linguistics. This racial trait replaces skilled.
Variant Ability: (9) You gain a +2 racial bonus to strength.
Proficiencies: A shifter is proficient with the following weapons: club, dagger, dart, quarterstaff, scimitar, scythe, sickle, shortspear, sling, and spear. She is also proficient with the natural attacks (claw, bite, and so forth) from the shifter claws class feature and of forms she assumes with wild shape.
Shifters are proficient with light and medium armor but are prohibited from wearing metal armor. A shifter can wear wooden armor that has been altered by the ironwood spell so that it functions as if it were steel. Shifters are proficient with shields (except tower shields) but must use only those crafted from wood.
A shifter who wears prohibited armor or uses a prohibited shield is unable to use her shifter aspect, shifter claws, wild shape, and other shifter supernatural or spell-like abilities while doing so and for 24 hours thereafter.
Shifter Aspect: At 1st level, a shifter gains her first aspect—a category of animal to which her body and soul have become supernaturally attuned. She can shift into her aspect’s minor form (see Aspects) for a number of minutes per day equal to 3 + her shifter level. The duration need not be consecutive but must be spent in 1-minute increments. Shifting into a minor form is a swift action, while ending the effect is a free action that can be taken only on the shifter’s turn. Until a shifter reaches 9th level and gains the chimeric aspect class feature, she can assume only one minor form at a time. Shifting to a new aspect (or aspects, in the case of chimeric aspects or greater chimeric aspects) ends all minor forms currently manifested. The minor forms of aspects are not polymorph effects, and the shifter does not lose the benefits of a minor form while affected by polymorph effects.
As the shifter gains levels, she gains more aspects; she gains her second aspect at 5th level, a third aspect at 10th level, and a fourth at 15th level.
Shifters Claws: At will, a shifter in her natural form can extend her claws as a swift action to use as a weapon. The claws on each hand can be used as a primary natural attack, dealing 1d4 points of piercing and slashing damage. If she uses one of her claw attacks in concert with a weapon held in the other hand, the claw acts as a secondary natural attack instead.
As the shifter gains levels, the power of her claws increases. At 3rd level, her claws ignore DR/cold iron, DR/magic, and DR/silver. At 7th level, her claw damage increases to 1d6. At 11th level, her claw damage increases to 1d8. At 13th level, her claw damage increases to 1d10. At 17th level, the damage die does not increase, but the critical multiplier becomes ×3. Lastly, at 19th level, the claws ignore DR/adamantine and DR/—.
While a shifter uses wild shape to assume her aspect's major form, her natural attacks gain the same benefits granted by her shifter claws ability. If the form she takes has claw attacks, she can use either the base damage of her shifter claws or the damage of the form's claws, whichever is greater. If the form does not have claw attacks, she can choose up to two natural attacks that would deal less damage than her shifter claw damage and have those attacks instead deal the same damage as her shifter claws.
Wild Empathy: A shifter can improve the attitude of an animal. This ability functions as a Diplomacy check to improve the attitude of a person. The shifter adds her shifter level and Charisma modifier to the roll to determine the wild empathy check result. The typical domestic animal has a starting attitude of indifferent, while wild animals are usually unfriendly. To use wild empathy, the shifter and the animal must be within 30 feet of one another and under normal conditions. Generally, influencing an animal in this way takes 1 minute but, as with influencing people, it might take more or less time.
The shifter can also use this ability to influence a magical beast with an Intelligence score of 1 or 2, but she takes a –4 penalty on the check.
Track: At 2nd level, a shifter adds half her level as a bonus on Survival checks to follow tracks.
Defensive Instinct: At 2nd level, when unarmored, not using a shield, unencumbered, and conscious, the shifter adds her Wisdom bonus (if any) to her AC and CMD. If she is wearing nonmetal armor or using a nonmetal shield, she instead adds half her Wisdom bonus to her AC (minimum 0). In addition, the shifter gains a +1 bonus to her AC and CMD at 4th level. This bonus increases by 1 for every 4 shifter levels thereafter (up to a maximum of +5 at 20th level).
These bonuses to AC apply even against touch attacks and when the shifter is flat-footed. She loses these bonuses when she is immobilized or helpless. These bonuses do not stack with the monk AC bonus class feature.
Woodland Stride: At 3rd level, a shifter can move through any sort of undergrowth (such as briars, natural thorns, overgrown areas, and similar terrain) at her normal speed and without taking damage or suffering any other impairment. Briars, thorns, and overgrown areas that are enchanted or magically manipulated to impede motion still affect the shifter.
Wild Shape: At 4th level, a shifter gains the ability to turn herself into the major form of one of her aspects and back again. This ability functions as beast shape II, except as noted here. The shifter can turn into the major form of only one of her aspects at a time. Using wild shape to change to a major form or back is a standard action that doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity. Often a particular aspect’s major form grants abilities beyond the normal effect of beast shape II. Each major form details the abilities the shifter gains with that major form and at what level; she gains these instead of the form abilities from beast shape II, but she still gains beast shape II abilities that are size dependent.
A shifter loses her ability to speak while in animal form because she is limited to the sounds that a normal, untrained animal of that form can make, but she can communicate with other animals of the same general grouping as her form. She can also communicate in nonverbal ways with allies.
A shifter can use wild shape for a number of hours each day equal to her shifter level + her Wisdom modifier. It need not be consecutive but must be spent in 1 hour increments. For abilities that function based on ‘uses of wild shape,’ each hour of wild shape counts as a use.
Shifters can take feats and other abilities that require wild shape; for the purpose of qualifying for prerequisites, her effective druid level is equal to her shifter level.
DESCRIPTION
Orchid is now a woman fully, or mostly fully grown, and has gradually filled out from the emaciated waif that Sandru first met. That said she is still thin and hard, with the lean figure of someone who works every day for their livelihood. Her hair is black and short, getting roughly cut whenever it becomes too long and gets into her eyes. Orchid changes clothes regularly, now that Sandru has finally impressed the importance of it on her, but favours sturdy and practical jerkins and trousers over skirts and the embroidered blouses so beloved of varisian caravan followers. Her dress sense and physique have led to Orchid being mistaken for a boy more than once and her strangely gravelly voice adds to the effect.
She almost always smells of animals, generally the horses she spends most of her time with, which overlays her natural scent unless tackled with serious application of soap and water – something she resists ferociously. The only piece of personal grooming Orchid does not regularly disregard is cleaning her teeth, which she does ritually every morning and night. As a result her teeth are impressively white in an otherwise sun-darkened face, although an astute observer might notice that she has rather more canines than is normal in humans.
Overall, Orchid looks much like stable hands the world over, practical, somewhat disheveled and reeking of horses. Whether she would ever be willing to clean up, and what the result would be, is a question that awaits the right time or perhaps the right person.
BACKGROUND
Orchid has been with Sandru Vhiski for years, ever since he set out on his own in the caravaning business. On an otherwise uneventful trip near the Storval Plateau the caravan was encamped one night when it was attacked by a pack of starving wolves who were so hungry that even the usual defenses of fire and loud noises were insufficient to scare them off. Leading the defense from the front, Sandru was busy for the entire skirmish and it was only when the wolves retreated to lick their wounds that he found that the door to the supplies caravan had been opened and two sacks of food, as well as a bottle of fine Chelish brandy and one of his handkerchiefs, were missing.
Being naturally kind-hearted Sandru couldn't bring himself to chase down the thieves and continued the route, writing the supplies off as an investment in a good story that he could tell at the trading posts. That was the last he thought of the matter until nearly a week later when a child caught up with the slow-moving caravan. Covered in dirt and long hair the figure was barely recognisable as a human at all and the guards were about to drive it away when it collapsed in front of them. Closer examination revealed the figure to be a girl, with a massive bruise across her chest and at least six broken ribs. Strangest of all, she clutched Sandru’s handkerchief in one filthy hand.
Over the next two weeks the girl lay in one of the wagons, fighting a deep fever and nearly dying more than once. Most of the caravan sat with her at one point or another and heard how she spoke, sometimes in the common tongue and sometimes in barks and yips more like a dog or wolf than a human being. Eventually the girl pulled through thanks to the magic of the caravan’s Fortune Teller and by the time Sandru came to conclude the caravan and begin a new route the strange girl was a part of the family and his original plan of dropping her off at an orphanage in Magnimar was roundly condemned by the whole caravan.
Madam Vicorsa named the girl ‘Orchid’, a beautiful wildflower for a child of the wilderness. Orchid lived up to her name, although she proved to be wild rather than a flower, and civilization came slowly to her. Clothes were gradually accepted, especially as the weather turned colder, but concepts such as regular washing, eating with more than the most basic utensils and manners remained foreign things which Orchid fiercely resisted. She did show a gift for animals though and was soon the caravan’s horse-master as well as a surprisingly accomplished scout – able to move quietly across almost any terrain and keep the horses moving through some of Varisia’s most inclement weather.
Travellers and wagoneers came and went, as is the nature of the caravans, and eventually Sandru and Orchid were the only survivors of the original caravan into which the girl had stumbled, near dead, years before. Beginning to slow down a little himself and keen to repay a debt to his adoptive mother Sandru set his new caravan on course to Sandpoint, telling Orchid that it was about time that she met his mother for herself.
