# Race: Centaur > [!info] Quick Facts > | | | > |---|---| > | **Rarity** | Very rare | > | **Perception in Gryth** | Neutral, and cooling. Respected in Ganath as a people who held when nobody else did, and increasingly described in the trading houses as hostile. | > | **Guide Section** | Very Rare Races | ## Overview Centaurs are the fey people of [[Continent - Ganath|Ganath]]’s open country, horse-bodied from the waist down and faster across ground than anything else on the continent. Their ceremonial homelands are Zaphir-Ak, where the tribes gather at Kadachi and the Sacred Sites of Nostaath, and where a culture older than most of Gryth’s kingdoms still runs unbroken from band to band. ## Zaphir-Ak Zaphir-Ak is not a nation in the way the trading companies would like it to be. It has no throne and no capital, and what holds it together is a web of tribes, obligations, songs, grazing rights and ancestral debts that has been running continuously for as long as the sun has risen and set in the sky. A centaur knows which bands their own owes a season to, which sites they are permitted to stand at, and which quarrels are three hundred years old and still open. The Sacred Sites of Nostaath are the centre of all of it. Bands that spend the year a thousand miles apart will converge there, settle what needs settling, and scatter again. Outsiders have seen the gatherings from a distance. None has been invited. ## The War When the Svaltum sent their warforged army into Ganath, the centaurs fought them and held. Zaphir-Ak’s borders bent in places and broke in none, which is a sentence that can be said about almost nowhere else in the war’s path. Then, on a morning the bands still mark, the enemy simply stopped. Something was worked far to the east, by people the centaurs never met and have never been told the names of, and the war ended before the warforged had made any real advance into centaur country. Centaurs regard this with a kind of grim dissatisfaction. They held, and were denied the ending, and whatever it was that reached across the continent and stopped the enemy mid-stride has never been explained to them. Some bands still keep war-songs for an opponent they never got to finish. ## Into the Wildlands The war left [[Region - The United Wildlands|Githwin]] devastated, its forest cities burned and its subterranean societies killed with poison clouds, and it broke the troll hordes of the south entirely. What followed was a vacuum, and the centaurs moved into it. Bands pushed out from the ceremonial lands into country that had held somebody else a generation earlier, and today a substantial centaur population lives in Githwin alongside the wood elves, firbolgs, orcs and goblins who were there before them. They have not become Githwinners. The bands keep their own obligations, return to Nostaath when the season calls for it, and treat the Wildlands as ground they now hold rather than a place they belong to. ## What They Will Not Have Centaurs are hardy, strange to deal with, and openly mistrustful of humans, whom they associate with ships, contracts and the steady arrival of people who want something. They have refused every approach made to them: no treaty, no protectorate, no concession, no trading post. [[Faction - Evereach Trading Company|Everreach]] and Aurora Exotics have both tried, and both have had envoys turned back at the edge of centaur country by riders who state the position once and do not negotiate. Where the companies have pressed, it has gone further than that. A trade mission that ignores a centaur warning tends to come back short-handed, and the centaurs have never once pretended otherwise or apologised for it. ## Centaur Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Strength score increases by 2, and your Wisdom score increases by 1. **Age.** Centaurs mature and age at about the same rate as humans. **Creature Type.** You are a Fey. **Size.** Your size is Medium. **Speed.** Your walking speed is 40 feet. **Charge.** If you move at least 30 feet straight towards a target and then hit it with a melee weapon attack on the same turn, you can immediately follow that attack with a bonus action, making one attack against the target with your hooves. **Equine Build.** You count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push or drag. In addition, any climb that requires hands and feet is especially difficult for you because of your equine legs. When you make such a climb, each foot of movement costs you 4 extra feet instead of the normal 1 extra foot. **Hooves.** You have hooves that you can use to make unarmed strikes. When you hit with them, the strike deals 1d6 + your Strength modifier bludgeoning damage, instead of the normal damage for an unarmed strike. **Natural Affinity.** Your fey connection to nature gives you an intuitive understanding of the natural world and the animals within it. You have proficiency in one of the following skills of your choice: Animal Handling, Medicine, Nature, or Survival. **Languages.** You can speak, read, and write Common and Sylvan. ## Connections - [[Continent - Ganath]] — Homeland; ceremonial lands of Zaphir-Ak - [[Region - The United Wildlands]] — Githwin; substantial centaur population settled there after the war - [[Faction - Evereach Trading Company]] — Has tried and failed to make approaches to centaur country --- ## Gallery ![[Race - Centaur.jpg]] --- *See also: [[Races]]*