# Race: Triton (Merfolk) > [!info] Quick Facts > | | | > |---|---| > | **Rarity** | Rare | > | **Perception in Gryth** | Negative. Their haughtiness towards surface dwellers has cost them any credit for guarding the deep. | > | **Guide Section** | Rare Races | ## Overview Tritons are native to the roaring oceans and hidden oases of [[Continent - Iros|Iros]], and surface dwellers generally call them merfolk whether they like it or not. They are proud, amphibious and isolationist, and they hold the deep against threats that no coastal kingdom has ever had to name. That service has not translated into goodwill; their haughtiness towards outsiders has earned them a broadly negative reputation across Gryth. ## The Watch Below What tritons do, and have done for as long as anyone can establish, is guard. The waters off Western Iros are not clean water. When the Shattering drowned Tultan beneath a wave a kilometre high, the evil Utaz unleashed that night sank with the land and settled into the seabed, and the Drowned Lands have been producing things ever since. Demons and devils took the ruins. The dead rose in the silt and stayed risen. The things that come up out of the Kalikan Depths are described in triton records by number and by the damage they did, because they have never been given names. The triton holds in that water, and lives in it. Their settlements ring the Grand Reefs and run down into the sunken streets of Tultan itself, and the business of a triton household is the watch: patrols, wards, long silent stretches of nothing, and then a night that nobody afterwards describes in detail. Help from the coastal powers has been offered twice in recorded history and refused both times. ## Who Lives in a Drowned Country The tritons hold the Drowned Lands in company. Sea elves keep deep courts there, far from the shelf off [[Region - High Vel'Nora|High Vel’Nora]] that their kin claim, and water genasi are born into those waters in numbers found nowhere else, which the tritons take as the sea making more of what it needs. The three peoples govern themselves separately and meet as neighbours, on a coastline nothing else wants and against a list of things that come out of the dark. The arrangement has held for an age on that basis alone. What binds the place together is the magic in it. The deep and dark workings laid down when Tultan drowned have never dispersed; they run through the water, the silt and the ruins, and anything that lives there for long is shaped by them. Tritons speak of the Drowned Lands as a living thing with opinions, and are not entirely joking. ## The Gasping Gates An air-breather cannot simply swim into the Drowned Lands. The way in runs through the Gasping Gates, and the Gates are a test rather than a passage. What they ask for is will. Those who hold come through able to breathe and move in waters that should have killed them. Those who falter remain in the Gates, and nothing goes in after them. How the Gates choose is a question the tritons have never answered, and may not be able to. They will carry an outsider as far as the entrance, explain what is about to be asked, and wait on the far side to see who comes through. A great many have not. Those who have are the only air-breathers in Gryth who have seen what the tritons are actually guarding, and they come back noticeably quieter on the subject of triton arrogance. ## Pride, and the Price of It Tritons consider themselves the senior people of the world, and they are not shy about it. A triton speaking to a surface dweller tends to do so the way a magistrate addresses a crowd, and the courtesy they extend is real but entirely one-directional. They will assist a drowning sailor, decline the thanks, and cite the whole incident later as evidence that the surface needs watching. The result is that a people who have spent an age dying quietly on behalf of everyone else are widely disliked by everyone else. Coastal towns know tritons mainly as the ones who turn up, issue instructions and leave. Few surface dwellers have any clear idea what sits under the Drowned Lands, and the tritons have let that stand, reasoning that telling them would change nothing about how they behave. ## Oases and Other Waters Not every triton lives in the ocean. Iros is a continent of deserts, and the great spring-fed oases of its interior hold triton communities that have been cut off from the sea for so long that the connection survives only in their records. These inland tritons are fewer, stranger and considerably more insular than their ocean kin, and some of them keep watches of their own over water that goes down a great deal further than the surface suggests. A triton met abroad is almost always an exile, an envoy or a watcher who has followed something inland, and will take some time to say which. ## Triton Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Strength, Constitution, and Charisma scores each increase by 1. **Age.** Tritons reach maturity around age 15 and can live up to 200 years. **Creature Type.** You are a Humanoid. **Size.** Your size is Medium. **Speed.** Your walking speed is 30 feet, and you have a swimming speed equal to your walking speed. **Amphibious.** You can breathe air and water. **Control Air and Water.** You can cast *fog cloud* with this trait, *gust of wind* from 3rd level, and *water walk* from 5th level. Once you cast a spell with this trait, you cannot cast that spell with it again until you finish a long rest. You can also cast these spells using spell slots of the appropriate level. Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma is your spellcasting ability for them; choose when you select this race. **Darkvision.** You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You cannot discern colour in darkness, only shades of grey. **Emissary of the Sea.** You can communicate simple ideas to any Beast, Elemental, or Monstrosity that has a swimming speed. They can understand your words, though you have no special ability to understand them in return. **Guardian of the Depths.** You have resistance to cold damage. **Languages.** You can speak, read, and write Common and Primordial. ## Connections - [[Continent - Iros]] — Homeland (the oceans off Western Iros and the oases of its interior) - [[Region - High Vel'Nora]] — Sea elf kin claim the shelf off its coast --- ## Gallery ![[Race - Triton.jpg]] --- *See also: [[Races]]*