Homebrew Jackal Species Details

This race was copied over from The Delver's Guide to Beast World for use in the D&D Beyond UI! DGtBW is project successfully kickstarted in only 10 minutes, you can find the official book on www.thedelversguide.com, be sure to check it out !!

“I held your grandmother as a pup. I walked this street when it was a field. I discovered myself alongside the first beasts.”

- Faiza, decisively settling the “oldest player goes first” rule of the game she brought to the party

Storybook Beasts

Every adult beast remembers a time many believed that jackals didn’t exist at all. Seeing one—and remembering one had done so—was so rare that they were considered a tall tale invented by nobles and eager-to-impress travelers. Parents told their children the stories of their magnificent cities. Fairy tales and fables used jackals as stock characters known for their wisdom and cool heads.

Twelve years ago, the rest of the world was faced with the impossible task of finding millions of brethren migrants their next meal. To aid their fellow beasts, hundreds of jackal envoys appeared in every homeland. For four years after, jackals lived among common people to lead the engineering effort with advanced knowledge of nature and science.

Jackals are known to exist by the public today, but their reclusive nature hasn’t changed much. Their home cities remain shrouded in ancient magic, and most of their knowledge and history are still guarded secrets.

Memory of the Beginning

When the first beasts were lifted up by the goddess Pirhoua about 1300 years ago, the jackal species were a special exception. These chosen children were adopted by the Seelie, a swirling collective of nature spirits that were deities of the world that came before the current one. The Seelie sat among Jackals in dreams, telling them all the knowledge of the wild place passed away. Their bodies were preserved by the Seelie’s remaining power. They stay young for centuries to help study the Beast World’s natural splendor.

As they slept in the world’s early nights, the first jackals sat under the tutelage of divinity in the Seelie Court. Only the oldest generation know the full lessons of those early nights. Jackal secrets are shared orally and never written. What the larger Beast World knows is, the few words of these secrets jackals shared after the Pilgrimage caused an explosion of agricultural progress and curiosity about the larger world. The full breadth of this guarded knowledge would likely make the world unrecognizable with its emergence.

The natural lifespan of a jackal is unknown; none have died of old age in the thousand years since their uplifting. The eldest generation remember the moment their minds raced from an animal’s with the gift of will for the first time. Despite their lifespan, a young jackal still grows to adulthood at the same rate as any other beast. A jackal’s natural aging slows around age 25 and advances a biological year around every 20 real years.

Jackals rear children the same way they do everything: slowly, deliberately, cautiously. They make the decision with the guidance of their community’s wisest members, only when certain that it’s according to the Seelie’s will that a new jackal should enter the world. Every baby is considered a sacred gift of the highest order.

With Enough Time

Patience is more than a virtue it is a fundamental truth in a jackal’s life. They do not take action before they are sure of its impact and worth. This makes conversation with an elder jackal a grueling test of patience, and negotiating to change their mind even moreso. However, their advice is a precious commodity—every court in the world begs to have a jackal advisor.

One can at least rest assured that they won’t be interrupted in conversation. A jackal does not speak until they have heard a message, taken time to consider the motives and implications of what they’ve heard, and done the same for their own response. This makes jackal society impeccably polite and proper. A social call between important figures is often marked by several hours of introductions and the announcement of honorifics and titles.

Impatient folks often find their minds wandering as a jackal sits in silence, working out what they’ll say next. A drinking game among delvers is to see who can provoke their jackal crewmate to cut in during conversation. Most are quietly tolerant of this tomfoolery, but some less benevolent elders remember any slight, and seek retribution long after the perpetrator has forgotten.

Forgotten Cities

Unlike other species, Jackals live separated in their own cities, irrespective of the homelands’ political boundaries. Magic illusions older than the world itself keep their homes imperceptible to outsiders searching for them. The only time one finds a jackal city is when one isn’t looking for it. Even knowledge of its precise location is useless without the explicit permission of the illusion’s keeper in a city.

Their reverence to the Seelie’s sleeping gods gives jackal society close ties with lost nature. Each of their cities embodies love for some expression of the Seelie’s magnificence. They’re built in impossible locations, out of cloudstuff and around giant ancient trees and underneath ocean waves. Every jackal city is uniquely breathtaking and an outsider who finds one is blessed to do so.

Leisure Time of the Everliving

No one can spend all their time in serious intellectual pursuits. Jackals have lively and unusual pastimes that have become more popular among other people as they meet their weird old neighbors.

Jackal parlors are social clubs common in all their hidden cities. Parlors are grand architectural wonders that contain dozens of shelves with hundreds of their games. It’s customary to contribute new games regularly, and nothing honors a jackal more than when someone plays one they created.

The jackal parlor’s game library is an exploration of every activity possible while sitting at a table. Some are a simple deck of cards traded between players with four or five rules. Other games involve contraptions with hundreds of tiny moving parts, which require intense concentration and dexterity to play competitively. Many popular jackal games are elaborate simulations of some other activity, with complex mathematical formulae for determining outcomes contained in multiple rulebooks, each hundreds of pages long.

The parlor is a growing fascination in the outside world, now that the wisest jackal elders have deemed it acceptable to share. Larger cities in the Beast World contain a parlor run by jackals who patiently explain and reiterate the rules of their games for curious visitors. Only daring and genius outsiders attempt to learn the most complicated jackal games, but centuries-old champions have new rivals now that the pool of competitors has grown by a few orders of magnitude.

Three Acres War

While the jackals have never participated in open warfare, they recognize the stimulating challenge of a tactical face-off. Many parlor games recreate various aspects of war (a popular field surgery game has players use a pair of tiny tweezers to operate on a miniature body), but one stands above the rest. Three Acres War is a game with a world-spanning subculture devoted to its intersection of warfare simulation and storytelling.

In Three Acres War, a miniature battlefield is the site of each skirmish. 3AW enthusiasts spend countless hours crafting every bush and tree of hillside battlefields and forest ambush points. Entire jackal social clubs are held by their bored spouses, meeting while they spend weeks sequestered in landscape workshops.

Once they determine the site of the battle, competitors produce their armies. A soldier in the Three Acres War is so much more than a two-inch wooden figure. Every member of a unit has an identity and elaborate backstory. A skilled player’s soldiers have skirmish histories spanning hundreds of pages of triumph, heartbreak, romance, and intrigue.

The skirmish itself is played according to a tome of common rules. These rules come under review during a player convention held once every three years. They change and refine to keep player tactics from stagnating. The Three Acres War has been a balancing act of supply lines, and other iterations the rules have been a blow-by-blow simulation of swordplay and chivalry.

Victory earns an army accolades and experience develops a soldier’s skills. Defeat is often heartbreaking, as fallen soldiers are removed from the game world. Parlors close to hold funerals for a soldier of great renown, as their miniature bodies are cremated. The ritual is more than a shared hobby—mourning a wooden soldier is preferable to forgetting the game’s lessons and stoking the fires of real war

Three Acres War is a close-knit circle of players who keep its shared history sacrosanct. The first non-jackal generals have emerged, earning admission into this sacred order of enthusiasts. Like everything else in the Beast World, things are changing quickly.

Jackal Traits

If a brethren or beast of another species meets a jackal, it becomes a story they tell for years.

Creature Type

You are a Fey.

Ability Score Increase

Your Dexterity score increases by 2, your Intelligence score increases by 2, and your Wisdom score increases by 2.

Size

Jackals are the tallest of all Beast Worldnative species, standing between 6’8” and 7’8”. Your size is Medium.

Speed

Your walking speed is 30 feet.

Ageless

You are immune to any effect that ages you at an unnatural rate.

Obscuring Dream

You can cast the dream spell once with this trait and regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. You can also cast either of those spells using any spell slots you have of the appropriate level. Intelligence is your spellcasting ability for it when you cast it with this trait.

When you cast dream, instead of causing a messenger to appear in a creature’s dream, you can cast a mental fog over their recollection of an encounter with you. They’re unaware that they are the target of the spell, but it fails if you made a jarring impression on the creature during the encounter (such as by fighting them or using strange magic). Otherwise, the target must make an Intelligence saving throw with a DC equal to 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier. A creature with an Intelligence score lower than yours automatically fails the save. If you have a body part, tuft of fur, clipping from a claw, or similar portion of the target’s body, the target makes its saving throw with disadvantage. On a failed save, the creature forgets that you were present in their memory of an encounter up to 1 hour long that happened within the last 7 days. The event isn’t erased, but your identity becomes a missed detail in the target’s long-term memory. On a successful save, the memory is unaffected and you can’t use the spell to alter the same memory again.

Life's Passion

You gain proficiency with one artisan’s tool of your choice, and in one skill chosen from the following: Arcana, History, Medicine, Nature, or Religion. Your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make using either of these proficiencies. Additionally, you gain proficiency with one martial melee weapon without the heavy property, which counts as a finesse and thrown (range 20/60) weapon for you.

Birthmates of the Arcana

The Seelie’s uplifting of the jackal species coincided with the nursing of the infant Arcana, and their fundamental connection to it grants them spell-like abilities. You know the eldritch blast cantrip.

Additionally, choose two 1st-level spells with the ritual tag from the wizard spell list. You can cast each of them with this trait, ignoring any material components without an indicated cost. Once you cast either chosen spell with this trait, you can’t cast that spell with it again until you finish a long rest. You can also cast any of those spells using any spell slots you have of the appropriate level. Intelligence is your spellcasting ability for these spells when you cast them with this trait.

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