Hex Crawl 23 #251: The Ayotochin (Player Race)

One hex southwest, eleven northeast of Alakran. 

 

In this desolate hex, an encounter roll of 1 will cross your path with that of an ayotochin wanderer, seeking justice for the slaves of Ukutta.

I don't like halflings in any of my games. And 5e halflings are particularly repulsive to me, their tiny Liefeld feet crudely announcing to the world that no intellectual property debt is owed to Tolkien. Their niche can usefully be replaced by small funny animal folk of various kinds -- frog-folk, rabbit-folk, talking ducks. Others agree.

So when a player in the Game of Bronze said he wonted to play a halfling bard, I explained the funny animal concept and he decided to play an armadillo-man - an ayotochin, as I styled the race, after the Nahuatl. These creatures combine traits of different armadillo species.

 The lore:

The Ayotochin (singular, Ayotochtli; adjective and short form, Ayoto), are a species of armadillo-like humanoids known in the Urig trade-tongue as hallu-awile ('dillo-folk). They are found in the deserts and plains south and east of the Salt Sea, and scattered throughout the civilized lands adjacent.

Scholars who have travelled widely classify Ayotochin as "halflings" along with the rabbit-folk and frog-folk of more northern realms. Various theories have these small and generally mischievous humanoids originating either in the previous Yuga or in the Copper Age, created as entertainers for one of the dominant humanoid kindreds. These speculations are nonsense to Ayotochin themselves, who believe that they get their lively nature from their ancestor Father Rabbit, and their resilience from Mother Tortoise.

The dillofolk are about four feet long but can only stand three foot because of their plated keratinous shell. Their coloration is a light tan to dark brown, varying towards yellow or red. They are keen-scenting but near-sighted. Their plates overlap such that they can roll into a ball for protection. More acrobatically trained ones can roll this ball around by flexing their bodies inside. Their claws are long and optimized for digging, but civilized ayotochin will clip these nails from a number of their digits to allow for fine manipulation.

Ayotochin live in small villages of 20-50 individuals. They are herders of giant insects and growers of fodder for them, for their preferred food is insect meat ,and insect shells which are crunched the better to strengthen their own carapace. However, they can also live on other kinds of meat and plants, and find eating large quantities of smaller insects enjoyable. A typical village will have some combination of giant beetles, ants, millipedes, sowbugs, or centipedes, kept in pens or herded around on leashes attached to piercings in their shells. There will usually also be fields where grass and shrubs are cultivated to feed the insects, and sometimes pits and wells where large quantities of normal-sized bugs and larvae are grown.

Giant centipedes are particularly important in Ayotochin life, despite the poison which requires special handling on long-handled collars. Centipede flesh has euphoric and hallucinogenic properties to them. No festival or ceremony in an Ayoto village is complete without eating of this "black meat." Fire ants are forbidden by custom to cultivate in either giant or normal size, because their toxin is altogether a stronger and more addictive stimulant to the dillo physiology. Still, some dillo fiends seek them out in the wild.

Ayoto are particularly skilled at pottery, sandstone shaping, obsidian knapping, weaving, and knitting. Their charming crafts, dyed in vivid red, yellow, and green from desert minerals, are what they trade for other goods and necessities, as nobody else will eat Ayoto produce. Ayoto earthenware in particular is appreciated for its comical representations, sometimes obscene, of humans as ayotochin see them.

Dillo communities are usually protected with walls and trenches of earth, adobe, and branches. Things are set up so that everything can be drawn inside if there's trouble, including the insect herds. Village buildings have cellars and passages underground.To compensate for the species' poor vision, a trained hawk is sometimes kept tied to a pole on the roof of the chief's building, and squawks if it sees movement on the horizon. Everyone fights in times of danger, shooting with slings or the rarely acquired crossbow, and in close quarters using spears, obsidian axes, and weapons acquired from trade. Aggression is not in their culture, but strong defense is ingrained.

Ayoto gestation is long at nearly a year, and when birth occurs it is always of a set of identical quadruplets. After reaching adulthood, the village elders judge which of the quads has shown the most promise as a stable member of the community, initiate it into the village, and bid the others find another village or become wanderers. Many ayotochin thus become musicians, jesters, tinkers, pest controllers, or acrobats in human society, which views them appreciatively if somewhat condescendingly. It is bad luck to see one of one's birth-mates again past adulthood, and even worse luck to acknowledge their existence. In this way the ayoto gene pool remains diversified.

Ayoto beliefs about the universe are in constant flux. They have no fixed religion, but a series of fables which are often quoted to end an argument or to start another one. These fables deal with the folk-heroes Mother Tortoise and Father Rabbit, the villainous Dog who persecutes them both, the craven and opportunistic Vulture, the gullible and greedy Anteater, a mythical armadillo called the Pangolin who is oddly put together and always does things the wrong way, and the huge and clueless giant club-tailed armadillo Graven Tooth. Ayoto do not hold deep beliefs about how the world came to be or why it works the way it does, unless such ideas directly improve their lives. Metaphysical and cosmic speculation is a kind of entertainment among them, with competition to come up with the most ridiculous or elaborate story, and such productions are never taken seriously.

The crunch:

Ayotochin are treated as halflings without the traits, Brave and Halfling Nimbleness.

And with the following extra racial traits (slightly altered from the campaign):

Redillience

You have advantage on saving throws against poison. You have resistance against poison damage.

Armoured Dillo

You may not wear light armor. You have natural Light Armour (AC 12), or Medium Armour (AC 14) until the start of your next turn if you are taking the Hide or Defend action.

Rolly Poly

At the start of your turn, you may roll into (or out of) a ball as a free action. This allows you to move 40', through a larger creature's space (as Halfling Nimbleness), and gives AC 16 with no DEX bonus. You are Blinded and may not attack while in a ball.

Blinky Hog

You have disadvantage on Perception checks involving vision.

It also emerged during the campaign that armadillos can swim, but at the cost of gulping air for buoyancy, which makes them prone to belching afterwards.

Demihumans In Hardcore Mode

The basic superiority of demihuman player characters bedeviled the first and second editions of AD&D and haunted later versions of the game. In AD&D you got a raftload of benefits for being an elf or a dwarf - languages, dark vision, special defenses. Also, there were stat bonuses and penalties you could optimize to your class so the bonuses really helped and the penalties didn't hurt, especially with the generous "4d6 drop lowest" method of generating scores.

Simply put, there were few reasons to take a human over an elf magic-user, a human over a dwarf or half-orc fighter, a human over a demi-human thief. Most campaigns wouldn't live long enough to push up against level limits, and multiclassing could soften their sting by packing as many levels as allowed into a more slowly-advancing, super-skilled character. Then there was that other curious drawback of elves, again only really relevant at high levels: the raise dead spell wouldn't work on them because they didn't have souls.

Usually (certainly, in D&D from 2000 on) the solution is to give humans extra skills, feats, ability scores to compensate. But the raise dead peculiarity suggests another solution. Most house rules I know have some way to mitigate death at zero HP, whether it be AD&D's "bleeding out" or the kind of "death and dismemberment" rules I use in my game. Why not have these options available only to humans, or at least give humans a greater chance of surviving at 0 hit points and below?

In effect, the benefits of being a demi-human would be balanced by making them like computer games' hardcore mode, where there are no saves and death is permanent. At the very least, for example, they would bleed out at -5 instead of -10 HP, or suffer a -2 penalty to a 2d6 dismemberment table. Most harshly, they would die at -1 HP, with just the tiniest saving grace at 0.

The setting rationale could go as follows:

• Elves: Have no souls, their spirits once loosed from flesh are quick to return to the great beyond.
• Half-orcs: Likewise a bit light in the soul department. If a DM really is serious about making their social stigma count in the campaign, then they can compensate by giving only 50% of the penalty, and likewise for half-elves.
• Dwarves: Are tough, but when seriously injured, have a tendency to return to the native stone; dead dwarves turn to stone statues and can be stone-fleshed back to a point where healing can work for a little while.
• Gnomes and halflings: Have really sweet afterlives full of rollercoasters and second breakfast, and don't bother sticking around in this vale of tears.
• Humans: Are uncertain about their final destination, so cling tenaciously to life against the odds.

Really, if you play by-the-book AD&D, PCs have to be handed huge amounts of loot in order to level up, so buying raise dead spells eventually fulfils a safety-net niche similar to death and dismemberment - a risk you take with the system shock roll, but by no means the automatic end of the character. In that case, the elf drawback starts kicking in around third level or so when it becomes economically feasible to buy clerical services. But my new idea is more in line with how a lot of new-old-school DMs run games, and extends to all the demihuman races.

It Looks ... Familiar

First the Giant Rat of Sumatra ...

then the Flores Man "hobbit" ...

and now ... something always new out of Indonesia.

Elves and Dwarves Up, Halflings Down

Cave halflings are another story.

When using a race-as-class system in D&D, as I like to do, halflings have a problem. As outlined in the various versions of Basic D&D, they're little more than short thieves.

Now, elves explicitly started out in OD&D as hybrid fighter-magic-users and stuck with that concept in Basic, so they add something extra to the mix of classes. Dwarves, to the extent they have underground exploration abilities, are kind of a fighter-rogue hybrid; at least, they get more interesting the more they tend toward that, and less interesting the more they are just short fighters.

In my one page rules, although it's not quite so schematic as that, I did consciously try to include a fighter-wizard hybrid (elf), fighter-rogue (dwarf), and rogue-wizard (gnome) type. I suppose an expansion might also take on the various priest hybrids, with fighter (paladin), wizard (mystic) and rogue (monk) to complete the cross-fertilization. Is this a complete scheme, with anything else just being variants on the basic classes? Not sure, but it seems that way to me.

In race-and-class systems, by the way, the halfling also fails to take advantage of the diversity available. This all comes from the concept being too tied down to Tolkien, and made worse, not better, by all the quasi-halflings that show up in Tolkien knockoffs, from kender to gwarpys. But at the same time Tolkien gives us two hobbit models: a fighter-type (Frodo and his companions) and a thief-type (Bilbo). It's a concept made for separate race and class systems, but although in AD&D it's possible to play a halfling fighter, there's very little incentive to do so. The halfling is almost always optimized as a thief under most D&D rules.

Anyway, here are my one page elf and dwarf rules.