Harpy

rulescharacter-creationrace

Harpies have a bad rap. It’s not that flying isn’t useful — they’re favored as messengers & scout by everyone. But when you can’t manage an ounce of foresight & your principal unit of society is an invading flock, you might expect you’d become known as “bird-brains”, “featherheads”, or “rats with wings”. But that doesn’t matter. As far as you know, your kin, the flock, is the only way to survive.

Glassian harpies are split between urban “townbirds” & wild hunter-gatherers. Harpies are the backbone of every village defense & military reconnaissance plan in addition to serving as a vast distributed post office capable of delivering almost anywhere on Glass in under a week. Even though harpies are disastrously unproductive & energy-intensive in an agricultural society (averaging 1 family per 50 supporting human families), they’re begrudgingly accepted in this role.

Wilderness harpies are, in contrast, intermittently tolerated & despised. The wilderness is home to thousands of harpies, none of whom properly prepare for winter; and so, summertime fur-traders, itinerant laborers & hunters transform with the approach of winter into nomadic flocks of highwaymen & mercenaries.

Through the dawn of the Civil War, many a harpy has picked up a bow & learned to hunt their ‘fellow’ Glassian.

Racial Features

• Talons (Natural Weapon): 2 Physical.
• Clumsy Flight: Whenever you fly under a natural Fly speed you possess, your flight is always subject to the following restrictions:
  • You cannot hold or use items while flying. (Your arms are your wings.)
  • You need a 15’ cubic area in order to fly & cannot hover; being struck or flying through a smaller area triggers a Save to avoid crashing, as if falling (see Falling rules) from your present height in a downward arc from the point at which you crash in the direction you were heading.
  • You can only fly for a number of hours per day equal to your unfilled Max. Load.
• Bird Joints: You cannot throw things. Your shoulder joints just don’t work that way.
• Ooo Shiny: Once per scene/event, if you see something immediately valuable (treasure, useful item, food, opportunity) that wasn’t planned for, you may interrupt any ongoing action or discussion to pursue it immediately & gain +2 on any Save(s) required to do so. You must declare this before anyone else acts on the same opportunity. You cannot use Foresight.