campaign red

The Silver Trail is arduous, terrifying, and labyrinthine.

The Silver Trail is a small tangle of dense alpine forest--less than three miles square--that acts as the trial grounds for those who wish to become one of Crimson's raptorfolk. Generally, if one of his children or husbands asks he is willing to simply anoint them with his blood in a ritual to cause the change, but the option is there for those who want to earn their transformation and all outsiders must endure the trial if they wish to join the raptorfolk.

The details of the trial varies depending on the individual, but in all cases their vision is taken from them and they must endure pain and hardship while navigating the lack of sight. This blindness is temporary in those who succeed, but those who fail lose their eyes entirely. For this reason, there is no real scorn for those who fail; the risk is well-known, and none can argue that a person willing to risk their very sight didn't have their reasons.

Crimson's raptorfolk get Deadly Weaponry (piercing) 1, Claws 1, Tail 1, Unusual Hide 1, and Inhuman Visage 2.

Those who go through the trial find themselves so wholly transformed that even with the gnosis of form the trial gives, they still often have difficulty speaking for a few months. While the more superstitious say that this is due to the trial temporarily making the trial-goer more than human, it's actually just adjusting to an entirely new facial and throat structure. Raptorfolk instinctively employ a wide range of bird-like twitters, honks, and squawks to emote on top of ordinary speech; while these noises are rarely terribly threatening themselves, they're also not so immediately obvious that they can't disguise that their voice belongs to a raptorperson.

Young raptorchildren are little balls of downy white fuzz that molts at about 6 into mottled grey feathers, regardless of their adult plumage, until they reach puberty. Adult raptorfolk are sexually dimorphic--males are slightly smaller and have dull violet plumage and tails, while females are slightly larger, with bright blue-and-violet plumage and two long display feathers on their tails. All raptorfolk have black scales in the few places where they lack feathers, as well as psuedo-wings on their hands and arms--not large enough to use even for WAIR, but the feathers cover their fingers from an outside view. Despite their hands' resting posture being similar to the actual animals, they keep the same range of motion as any other human. Their faces have more flexibility than an actual raptor's, but are still very hard for the average person to read unless they grew up around raptorfolk.

Raptorfolk are still omnivorous despite their new shape, but they require a higher percentage of meat in their diets to be healthy and can have trouble chewing tougher plants. They do not gain or lose any resistances to poisonous plants compared to baseline humans.

The population of the Old Temple is too small for a lot of specialization, but most raptorfolk join the militia and work primarily as hunters and foragers rather than farmers most of the year (during harvest, everyone helps with the harvest unless they are physically incapable). Most raptorfolk that do manual labor trim their hand feathers for much of the year, for the sake of convenience.

If any of the raptorfolk traveled to a region where claw strider species were more common predators, they would have great difficulty finding a steed that didn't panic with them on their back—they have a subtle-to-humans (but VERY noticeable to horses and the like) predatory dinosaur stank.