Homebrew Gathlain Species Details

Gathlains grow from the seeds of an enormous magical tree—seeds that often drift for hundreds of miles before developing into adolescent gathlains, with the tree’s mistletoe grown into their flesh to form their strange wings. Despite being born with a basic understanding of their world, gathlains are inquisitive to a fault. They are known to be invaluable guides and knowledgeable explorers, if one can put up with their numerous questions and strange japes.

Physical Description: Wings of wood and vines grow out of the bodies of these lithesome fey. Gathlains prefer to wear a mix of clothing, with a base of natural materials like grass skirts or simply woven tunics combined with bits of finery gathered from a variety of sources.

Society: Gathlain society is built around art, discovery, experimentation, and storytelling. These fey constantly seek new ways to look at the world. Gathlain leaders are often popular explorers followed primarily as idols worth emulating and as sources of intriguing gossip. Although gathlains tend to engage in raucous romances born of melodramatic or fanciful encounters, they do not procreate conventionally from such pairings, even when the two happen to be of different physical sexes. Gathlains show little interest in gender, finding it quaint when other races use it as a basis for assigning roles or choosing partners.

Relations: Gathlains associate with a variety of other fey as freely as among their own kind. These mixed communities of fey are called courts and feature elaborate titles for those members deemed most interesting or most worthy of admiration. When a gathlain chooses to join a different community, it is generally a temporary membership, whether it lasts only a season or persists for decades. Adventuring gathlains frequently seek out and attempt to mingle with like-minded gnomes; however, gnomes often find gathlains too flighty, foolish, and undisciplined for their tastes.

Alignment and Religion: Mischievous and capricious, gathlains have discordant temperaments. Most are chaotic, and they tend to be morally neutral. The typical gathlain finds mortal religions strange; like many fey, they trade respect and token offerings to godlike fey in exchange for protection, but they see little difference between that and offerings to lesser kings and queens.

Adventurers: Gathlains strive to entertain themselves and sate their immense curiosity about the world around them, and those who decide to become adventurers often migrate to the Material Plane to explore. Those who remain in the First World seek the strangest parts of their home plane and try to learn about its most unusual inhabitants. They favor spellcasting classes and skilled classes such as bard or rogue.

Names: Gathlains lack gender-specific names, but instead attempt to create unique names for each individual. Some examples are Agollia, Armath, Arnonwy, Brazial, Dwynnen, Eirgara, Finnath, Gummow, Inirha, Marcanth, Nirialu, Sollowy, Tiltiu, and Urhiod.

Creating Your Character

At 1st level, you choose whether your character is a member of the human race or of a fantastical race. If you select a fantastical race such as the fairy or the harengon in this section, follow these additional rules during character creation.

Ability Score Increases

When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. Follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy. The “Quick Build” section for your character’s class offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You can follow those suggestions or ignore them, but you can’t raise any of your scores above 20.

Languages

Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player’s Handbook offers a list of languages to choose from. The DM is free to modify that list for a campaign.

Creature Type

Every creature in D&D, including each player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters are of the Humanoid type. A race in this chapter tells you what your character’s creature type is.

Here’s a list of the game’s creature types in alphabetical order: Aberration, Beast, Celestial, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Humanoid, Monstrosity, Ooze, Plant, Undead. These types don’t have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the cure wounds spell doesn’t work on a Construct or an Undead.

Life Span

The typical life span of a player character in the D&D multiverse is about a century, assuming the character doesn’t meet a violent end on an adventure. Members of some races, such as dwarves and elves, can live for centuries. Fairies and harengons, however, have a life span of about a century.

Height and Weight

Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world. If you’d like to determine your character’s height or weight randomly, consult the Random Height and Weight table in the Player’s Handbook, and choose the row in the table that best represents the build you imagine for your character.

Gathlain Traits

As a Gathlain, you have the following racial traits.

Creature Type

You are a Fey.

Size

You are Medium or Small.

Speed

Your walking speed is 30 feet.

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 discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.

Hardened Exterior

You gain a +1 bonus to Armor Class.

Flight

Because of your wings, you have a flying speed equal to your walking speed. 

Gathlain Magic

You know the druidcraft cantrip.

Starting at 3rd level, you can cast the entangle spell with this trait. Starting at 5th level, you can also cast the aid spell with this trait. Once you cast entangle or aid with this trait, you can’t cast that spell with it again until you finish a long rest. You can also cast either of those spells using any spell slots you have of the appropriate level.

Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells when you cast them with this trait (choose when you select this race).