Guar
% in lair: None
Dungeon encounter: None
Wilderness encounter: Herd (2d6)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120' (40')
Armor class: Desc 7, Asc 13, ACKS 3, as Ring Mail
Hit dice: 3
Attacks: 1 (bite)
Damage: 1d8
Save: F1
Morale: 0
Treasure: None
XP: 50
These bipedal lizards measure 10 to 12' from nose to tail and weigh around 650 lbs. They are omnivorous, eating roots, fungus, rats, and scrib with equal relish. Wild guar have been known to attack and eat humanoids during particularly lean years. Their ungainly heads contain fat and water reserves like the hump of a camel, over a thick skull containing a brain the size of a man's fist. During competition for mates, guar headbutt each other; these impacts resemble the initial collision in a sumo match. The guar's tail serves as an essential counterbalance to its front-heavy mass distribution; hence the Ashlander expression, "to be the tail of the guar", meaning to do a task which is important but unpleasant, unglamorous, or smelly. Domesticated guar express their affection by licking.
A herd of wild guar is often led by an huge old guar (or "old chonker") of 4HD and AC4 weighing 1100 lbs, whose bite deals 2d6 damage.
Both the Ashlanders and civilized dunmer raise guar for meat and as pack animals. As pack animals, a typical guar can carry 12 stone at 120' speed or up to 25 stone at 60' speed. Racing on guar-back is a popular sport among Ashlander children. Very large guar can carry 22 stone at 120' speed or 44 stone at 60' speed, but they are rarely used as battle mounts because they aren't very smart and tend to like to stop and eat things on the battlefield. Rumor has it that the Redorans are working on selectively breeding guar for carrying capacity and trainability as cavalry. When butchered for meat, a guar yields 25 stone, and a very large guar yields 44 stone.
The hide of a guar is a common ingredient in alchemical recipes, and the hides of very large guars are worth 100XP towards magical research dealing with Fellowship, Sanctuary, Vigor, Charm Animal, Summon Animal, and Predict Weather effects.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI noticed these 4 year old posts about ACKS and Morrowind.
I am considering running a Morrowind game on ACKS, but I am not sure what I would do with player classes and races available in Morrowind games.
Did you ever think about that? For example should the gamemaster create custom classes for races such as argonians and khajiits?
Hey! Yeah the variety and flexibility of character development in TES is definitely a challenge for D&D-like systems. I think I'm of two minds on it. One would be to just go the orthodox ACKS route and build ~2 classes per race that capture/represent archetypes about that race. For an approach like that, I do think it would make sense to work out race-point values per page 82 of the Player's Companion (supplemented by some of the forum discussions on racial custom-power pricing). I could see using Thrassian as a starting point (I had thought about using it as a starting point for lion-paladins). For argonian, a shaman/rangery pair of classes seems like a straightforward choice. Khajiit obviously needs a thiefy class, but for a second class... maybe something in the monk/assassin/blade-dancer space?
DeleteThe other approach to the problem of character development in the TES style might be to take ACKS' class-building rules and try to use them flexibly, like how beastman witchdoctors and shamans were handled in Axioms. This line of thought led me towards Everybody is Cultists and Everybody is Thieves.
I had thought about doing Paladin as a side-class like that, opening up to Lawful fighters at 4th level on invitation from a knightly order and performance of oaths and a quest, but I guess I never published it. It could be interesting to do side-classes on a per-guild basis, representing differing availability of different kinds of training in different organizations, but maybe it's too coarse-grained vs doing something small like adding stuff to class proficiency lists.