Floran
Floran are living, bipedal plants that travel the world in order to bring new skills and experiences back to their ancestral forest. All floran are basically human shaped. Some appear as idealized men and women exquisitely carved from fine wood, while others never quite pick up the trick of blending in, and look like shambling brutes made of bark and branches. Whatever their appearance, floran are known for their inquisitiveness, patience, and their love of songs.
A Unique Lifecycle
Floran are among the longest lived beings in the world, though thanks to their unusual life cycle the casual observer might never notice. A floran begins as a seed, then spends about 20 years as a sapling. Saplings are active only for brief periods, and has about the mental faculties of a human infant. Whole groves of saplings spend their infancy under the watchful gaze of rooted adult floran, to whom even a few hours of movement a week counts as rambunctious youth.
When a floran reaches about 5 feet tall, it begins to fill out and achieve the rough proportions and facial appearance of a human. It begins to move around more, and acquires the ability to speak. A few years after that, when the grove judges that they’ve taught the young floran what they can, the child is granted supplies to strike out on its own.
The following part of the floran’s life is the only time that most people will ever encounter one. The young floran is encouraged to see everything she can of the world and to accrue skills and experiences among the younger races that she’ll never have the chance to pursue again. It is a time of great freedom and experimentation, and although the floran is still considered a child by his own people, among humanoids he tends to be treated as the adult which he resembles. After 30 to 40 years of wandering, learning, adventuring, losing, and generally living life as fully as possible, a floran will seek some place to settle for the rest of his life, usually an established grove with other adults. There he undergoes a process called “rooting”, giving up his ability to walk in order to achieve a much more sedate adulthood.
Floran adults live for centuries, never again straying from the spot where they put down roots. Over this time they achieve truly monumental proportions, sometimes sheltering symbiotic communities of elves, gnomes, and other forest dwellers in their branches. Floran adults are still capable of speech and of moving their limbs, but tend to think, speak, and move very slowly and deliberately. To each other, it is said that they communicate by singing the Song of Seasons, a neverending melody inaudible to most humanoids that sets the tempo of the natural world and is filled with the wisdom of the floran ancients. Scholars in search of information about the distant past often petition elderly floran for help, but it takes great patience and effort to learn from the ancient treefolk. The stationary floran often ask a service from mobile petitioners in trade for their knowledge.
You can take the Floran out of the Forest…
As the old saying goes, you can take the floran out of the forest, but you can’t take the forest out of the floran. There are a few things that florans find particularly hard about travelling in the world. Fire unnerves them. It doesn’t actually harm a floran any more than it does an elf or human, since they are made of green, living wood that is as hard to set on fire as flesh is. They do have an instinctive aversion to it because of the deadly danger it poses to fully grown floran who can’t run away from a forest fire. When setting up camp for the night, it isn’t uncommon for a floran traveller to seek a patch of ground far away from the open flame.
Another ancient enmity built into the floran’s genes is their dislike of the myconids, a race of sentient fungi. After all, barring fire and men with axes, there is little that a centuries-old tree hates and fears more than tree rot. Myconids and floran have been in conflict for millennia, with the floran often enlisting aid from the younger races to stamp out myconid nests in their forests, and myconids infiltrating floran groves in order to infect them with exotic spores and other fungal diseases.
Floran Personalities
The important thing to remember about floran adventurers is that they are still children, even if they usually act and appear like humanoid adults. As plants, they live by a slower rhythm than most animals. They are patient, rarely given to rash action, and can happily sit in silence for hours. On the other hand, they seldom pass up a chance to experience something new, they throw themselves into unfamiliar situations with a lack of embarrassment that most can only envy, and they tend to be surprisingly good singers.
They can be naive to the harsh realities of life among the faster lived races, but even when they discover the world’s merciless truth, they tend to react with philosophical detachment. A denizen of the forest understands about the cycles of death and rebirth, after all.
Floran often find humor difficult to understand, and may attempt to figure it out by repeating jokes that they hear to unsuspecting companions. If their audience does not laugh the first time, they will explain the punch line repeatedly, to help them get it. Though they are too young to have any biological need to mate (and even for adult floran, the process involves flowers and pollinators and seeds more than intimacy and candle-lit dinners), travelling floran find love and humanoid intimacy endlessly fascinating. Floran do have genders, though truth be told it makes little difference to them which one they are. Some floran, especially among the wood nymphs, adopt idealized appearances in order to appeal to humanoids physically and explore this strange and wonderful emotion.
Others might take a more scientific interest, asking perhaps to observe a mating couple in order to advance their understanding.
Think of a few common experiences that your floran has never sampled, like going out to a show, being inebriated, cooking a meal, or playing a card game. Perhaps your character might find the chance to do so during the campaign, and might enlist your fellow player characters so that he or she “gets it just right”.
Floran Names
Florans have short, concise names, merely used as identifiers more than anything. They do not have family or clan names, though some popular names are reused often.
Male Names. Abur, Banua, Chonai, Dampunts, Gutai, Jara, Magny, Qachaa, Tachu, Targay.
Female Names. Choque, Chuaca, Coca, Cuilla, Cura, Ollssill, Pola, Rima, Sica, Sisuyo.
Floran traits
Floran live by a slower rhythm and possess patience to humble even the long-lived elves. In their own way, however, every floran is a child, and thus still in the process of becoming the person that they will be for the rest of their epochal lives.
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Age. Adventuring floran are considered children by their own people, but by the standards of most races they are adults. Floran leave the forest in their early twenties, and travel for around 40 to 60 years as humanoids. Once they root, they can live well in excess of a thousand years while growing to truly immense size.
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Alignment. Floran might seem slow-paced to other races, but they seek to get as much out of life outside as they can. Because they are technically children, they can be surprisingly impressionable and naive about the workings of the world, especially if they just left their forest. They tend toward neutrality, but their experiences as they travel can change their outlook dramatically.
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Size. Floran are shorter than humans, and range from 4 and a half to 5 and a half feet tall. Wood nymphs weigh slightly less than a human their height, roothulks slightly more. Your size is medium.
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Speed. Your speed is 30 ft.
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Languages. You know Sylvan and Common. Sylvan is the language of the forest denizens, and floran grow up playing with and learning from all manner of pixies, nymphs and naiads, but they learn Common in order to communicate with the outside world.
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Call of the Forest. You know the druidcraft cantrip. Once you reach 3rd level, you can cast the entangle spell once per day. Once you reach 5th level, you can also cast the plant growth spell once per day. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for these spells.
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Photosynthesis. You do not need to sleep while in sunlight. Instead, you can choose to sunbathe for 4 hours a day. While sunbathing, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep, and you are considered fully nourished for the rest of the day. If you do not get the opportunity to sunbathe, you can still sleep and eat normally. When you do so, you consume the same amount of food and sleep for the same length as a human.
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Bark Skin. Your skin is made of thick bark and vines. When you aren’t wearing armor, your AC is equal to 12 + your Dexterity modifier. You are considered to be wearing light armor with which you are proficient for the purposes of effects and class features, though you may choose not to benefit from this racial feature if an ability (e.g. monk or barbarian AC bonuses) would supersede it.
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Aversion to Fire. If you take fire damage, you have disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks until the end of your next turn.
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Subtype. Floran can be divided into wood nymphs and roothulks. Choose one group to which you belong.
Optional Traits
The following racial traits are optional. Some florans have them and some don’t.
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Buoyant. You are lighter, and float on water and similar liquids. This also means you cannot dive below the surface without aid.
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Coniferous. You are born of the wilds in the great northlands. As such, you have growths of pine needles and thinner bark. You gain resistance to cold damage, but gain a weakness to fire damage. If you are a Roothulk, this will limit your natural camouflage trait, as a creature knowledgeable with the surrounding flora might see that you stand out if you are in the wrong type of forest.
Roothulk
Those floran that never quite get the hang of appearing human are often called roothulks. Their facial features are rough and unfinished, looking more like wooden festival masks than the finely crafted forms exhibited by their fellow wood nymphs. Roothulks make up for this lack of subtlety by developing powerful physical gifts.
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Grasping Branches. Many roothulks have large branches growing from them, like antlers, or from their arms, like spikes. When making an opportunity attack, you can use your reaction to attempt a shove attack instead of a melee attack. Also, you know the thorn whip cantrip. Whenever you cast this cantrip and use it to bring a creature adjacent to you, you can use a bonus action to attempt to grapple the target.
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Natural Camouflage. Roothulks have many obvious plant features, which makes it harder to pass for a human but easier to blend in with the forest. You have advantage on stealth checks when hiding among vegetation.
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Wood nymph
Some floran are naturally gifted at controlling their appearance. They retain plant characteristics, such as leafy hair, wood grain swirls on their “skin”, or flesh that is hard and cold to the touch, but the net effect is a masterpiece of humanoid beauty wrought of elegant living wood. Floran wood nymphs find it easier to assimilate into animal society than their shape-challenged brethren, and their skills allow some of them to craft powerful disguises.
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Auto-topiary. You can control your growth in order to change your physical appearance. Over the course of the long rest you achieve a physical transformation similar to the effects of the disguise self spell, except that they are permanent and physically real instead of illusions. This does not affect equipment you are wearing, though you may grow approximations of clothing (like bark covering your body instead of a shirt, or leaves and vines woven together to look like a dress). You can change the color of your “skin” and “hair”, completely rearrange your facial features, and so on, but there will always be visual and tactile giveaways of your real nature.
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Life Sense. Wood nymphs have a mystical connection with living things. When you make a check to detect a living being, you have advantage on the check. This only applies to living biological organisms; beings animated by unnatural, magical, or supernatural forces rather than natural life (e.g. undead, constructs, elementals) are not detectable by your Life Sense.
Floran class options
An floran approaches some classes is a bit different than other races. When you select one of the classes in this list, it is modified as follows:
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Alchemist
A floran would not follow the Mad bomber field of study, or use the bomb concoction because of their aversion to fire.
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Barbarian
As a Floran, you have access to an exclusive Primal Path, the Path of the Blighted.
A Roothulk barbarian can use the thorn whip cantrip even while raging, and can do so as a bonus action.
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Bard
You can add the following spells to your bard spell list:
Spell Level Spells Cantrips mold plant, thorn whip 1st bridge of branches, entangle 3rd plant growth 4th tree strike 6th wall of thorns Wood nymphs have an alluring way that makes them well suited to be bards. Whenever the Bard class description mentions your Charisma modifier, you may instead use your proficiency bonus.
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Cavalier
Floran generally do not use mounts.
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Cleric
Floran are not very religious, but do revere the pantheon listed as the Celtic pantheon in the Cleric description. When following one of those gods with the appropriate domain, then whenever the class description mentions your Wisdom modifier, you may instead use this modifier +3 or your proficiency bonus, whichever is lower.
As a floran Cleric, the Rune-carved folk-specific skill costs 0 to you.
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Cursed
Floran cannot become lycanthropes or have the alchemical curse.
You may choose Wisdom or Charisma as spellcasting ability instead of Intelligence.
As a floran Cursed, the Rune-carved folk-specific skill costs 0 to you.
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Druid
Floran are very connected to nature. Whenever the druid class description mentions your Wisdom modifier, you may instead use your proficiency bonus.
In addition you are your own druidic focus, as well as a druidic focus to any adjacent druids. When using Wild Shape, you may also take the shape of plants and plant creatures.
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Feyblood
Fey and floran share the same forests, so it happens that florans are affected by fey magic, becoming feybloods.
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Fighter
Floran fighters may can add the following fighting style to their selection of fighting styles.
Gift of Darkwood
Lots of fighting and wounds have toughened your bark. While wearing no armor, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage that you take from nonmagical sources is reduced by 3 and your AC is 14 + Dex modifier. However, your rigid bark also slows you down, causing you to have disadvantage on Dexterity saves.
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Inquisitor
The religious practices of floran mostly ignore things outside their own communities, so the inquisitor role does not exist.
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Paladin
Paladins are very rare but they do exist among the floran, and are then embodiments of the heroic ideals for their race. This often confuses people when they first meet a floran paladin, as they expect a paladin to follow the human ideals.
Whenever the Paladin class description mentions your Charisma modifier, you may instead use your proficiency bonus.
In addition you can add the fighting style from the fighter entry to your selection of fighting styles.
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Professional
Floran do not have societies like most other humanoids, where practising crafts and pursuing knowledge is important. The florans do not need all those things that others require for their lives, and what they need, the forests provide.
Obviously the forester is off limits.
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Ranger
Florans are very attuned to nature and are well suited for a ranger’s life.
Whenever the Ranger class description mentions your Wisdom modifier, you may instead use this modifier +3 or your proficiency bonus, whichever is lower. In addition, you may use the same modifier instead of Strength or Dexterity when attacking. Make this choice at level 1 and it cannot be changed later.
In addition you can add the fighting style from the fighter entry to your selection of fighting styles.
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Rogue
Catching a floran rogue in a forest is next to impossible.
You have advantage on all stealth, perception, investigate and survival checks when in “your” type of forest.
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Sorcerer
As a floran Sorcerer, the Rune-carved folk-specific skill costs 0 to you.
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Swashbuckler
No change.
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Warlock
As a floran Warlock, the Rune-carved folk-specific skill costs 0 to you.
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Wizard
As a floran Wizard, the Rune-carved folk-specific skill costs 0 to you.