Hey everyone, it's once again wacky-animal-race-time. Todays subject is the armadillo girdled lizard (Cordylus Cataphractus)
To answer the five great W's (Wait, What? Why? W-What??!), it started of with me finding this picture: http://academic.sun.ac.za/botzoo/cindy/DSC00015.JPG
After some serious google-fu and wiki-jutsu I found out the name of the creature depicted (armadillo girdled lizard) and that it is an african lizard that preys mostly on insects and if it is threatened rolls up as you can see on the picture and actually rolls away.
I immediately fell in love with those cuties and besides trying to find out how to get some as pets i also thought i should come up with some rules for a small lizard-folk race for PFRPG for them, so here goes:
Cataphra racial traits
Small Humanoid (reptilian)
CON +2, WIS +2, INT -2: Cataphra are surprisingly hardy for their size and also wary and thoughtful, but care little for logical thought and academical study.
Size: Small
Base speed: 20 ft.
Natural armour +1: Cataphra have a thick scaly hide that protects them from physical attacks.
Low-light vision: Cataphra can see twice as far as humans in conditions of dim light.
Wheel tumble: Cataphra can roll up and bite their own tail to form a wheel. A cataphra can move at it's full speed while performing an acrobatics check to avoid attacks of opportunity without increasing the Check DC.
Further a cataphra moving down a slope of at least 20 degrees, can make an acrobatics check (DC 15) to increase her base speed by 20 feet for one round. If the slope goes down 30 degrees or more the acrobatics check DC for this maneuver increases to 20 and the Cataphras base speed increases by 30 feet. On a 45 degrees slope the DC increases to 25 but the Cataphra's base speed doesn't increase any further. This ability cannot be used on a slope of 55 degrees or more.
A Cataphra increasing her base speed with this ability gains a +2 circumstance bonus to her CMB for bullrush and overrun attacks.
The increased speed does multiply accordingly when making a run or charge action but it doesn't stack with other increases to the base speed, like barbarians' and monks' fast movement or haste spells.
Skilled: Cataphra gain a +4 racial bonus to Acrobatics checks.
Automatic Languages: Draconic and Common Bonus languages: Terran, Gnome, Gnoll, Goblin, Orc
All comments and criticism are welcome. :)
(Offtopic: By the way a message to Eyolf, Molly Dingle and possibly Dragonborn 3, I'm finally back and we can get the wacky animal races PbP campaign running, though instead of the shrewbles i might instead use this)
Hrnglmphrgh. I just wrote a whole block of background information and when i clicked Submit Post it all was lost in a browser error >__< Sorry, I might try this again later but right now i'm to frustrated to start over.
Yeah I like it too :)
So any comments on the race stats?