Homebrew Centaur (Horsefolk) Species Details

Maequanan Veldrunner was the pride of her lineage. No other Venegschild was as bold or as cunning as she! But here, she thought uneasily, here all her boldness and cunning was nothing. The paving stones under her hooves made her steps clatter in an offputting and unfamiliar way; she towered over the crowd of twoleggers in a way that made her feel clumsy and out of place; and the twolegger buildings towered over her in a way that was, frankly, claustrophobic. Mae knew that if she and her herd wanted to keep living on the rich grasses of the veldt, they had to make sure they stayed on good terms with the local twoleggers, and that meant going into twolegger towns for trade and diplomacy. But already, Mae found herself longing to return to the sweet grasslands that she called home...

 

Centaurs (also known as horsefolk) are a race of people living in the places in-between -- between civilization and wilderness, between human and equine, and -- in the eyes of other races -- between monstrosities and fellow sentients. With humanoid upper bodies and equinoid lower bodies, most centaurs prefer a life lived in wide-open spaces that can easily accomodate their large horse-halves. Though centaurs can come in many different shapes, sizes, and cultures, they share an emphasis on ancestry, community, and a rich oral tradition that unites the two. 

BRAWNY AND QUICK
Centaurs are big beings; while their equine halves match the size of the nonsentient equines they resemble, their humanoid halves are scaled up to match. Most centaurs stand between 4 and 6 feet at the withers, with a human half that adds another 3 to 4 feet of height, and they can weigh as 'little' as 500 pounds or as much as a ton. Smaller centaurs have bigger humanoid torsos in comparison to their equine halves, while bigger centaurs will have proportionally larger equine halves compared to their humanoid torsos. Their large size means that most centaurs tend to be very good in hand-to-hand combats; even an untrained centaur has a kick like... well, like a horse. Despite their large size, however, centaurs can be very quick off the mark, and are often unbeatable in a short sprint. In their human halves, they tend to have broad, flat faces and long noses; their fingernails are thick, covering most of the tip of the finger, and match the color of their hooves. In their equine halves, they can have all the coat colors and patterns of a domesticated horse: chestnut, bay, black, cream, dun, champagne, and grey, with roan, piebald, dappled, or spotted patterns. Many centaurs will dye or shave words in Equque (the centaur language) into their coats, extolling the worthiness of themselves or their lineage. Their hair, which is almost always worn long, extends down their spine to form a mane. While centaurs -- both men and women -- can and will grow long, flowing sideburns which are braided back into their manes, centaurs can not grow beards or mustaches. Their humanoid hair color always matches their tail color. Both tail and mane are often be braided back with beads or trinkets for both the purposes of ornamentation and to keep the hair out of the way. Their eyes can be brown, blue, green, grey, or hazel, just as human eyes can, but with large irises and elongated pupils similar to horses. The only clothing that centaurs wear consistently are wide belts -- usually beaded and embroidered in elaborate styles -- which cover the join between their humanoid and equinoid halves. Centaurs tend to wear any other clothing only if the situation calls for it -- coats and thick quilts for cold weather, or tunics and blankets for talking with sensitive twoleggers.

UNITY THROUGH CONFLICT
The most important thing in a centaur's life is and always will be the herd. Centaurs live in roving bands of between 5 and 15 people, usually composed of a matriarch, her children, her stallion-consort, and several other women and their children. A herd is made up of several affiliated bands, who will work together to maintain and defend a roaming territory. These bands and herds will usually make their livelihood through pastoralism, shepherding flocks of small domesticates such as goats or sheep as they wander their territory. Despite the emphasis on loyalty to the herd, however, within the herd there is a never-ending contest between bands and individuals for status and dominance. These contests can lead to ritualized dominance battles that look more like dances, full of charging and wheeling, punctuated by bone-breaking kicks and ear-piercing screams. Status is decided by a number of factors: your charisma, your personal achievements, the achievements of your matrilineal lineage, your courage and daring in seeking out and winning challenges, and even the status of your mother and maternal siblings. Lineage is vitally important to status, and is tracked through the mother's line; most centaurs can recite the names and deeds of their mothers and grandmothers to the tenth generation, and will take great pride in descending from a particularly successful herd leader or matriarch. Dominance, however, is decided solely based on your own personal merits of decisiveness and intelligence and your skill in winning dominance battles; the most dominant member of band is the one who leads that band in gaining status, and the most dominant mare in a herd is the one who makes decisions for a herd as a whole. Centaurs believe that these contests for status and dominance bring the herd together and ensure its overall survival, by ensuring that the most determined and wily survivors will be the ones leading the herd to success. A centaur's closest friends may be those who they challenge most often, and the strongest friendship may be forged by an initial, explosive challenge.

THE WORLD HERD
Despite this conflict-driven society, however, centaurs have a strong tradition of community loyalty and interconnection. Loyalty to one's band comes before anything else, even status and dominance. Even when different bands or herds compete for territory or status, those same bands and herds would come to one another's aid against an outside threat without hesitation. This powerful cultural bond is maintained through the story of the World Herd -- the herd composed of all centaurs everywhere, both living and dead, from the past, present, and future. Centaurs don't believe that their spirits go anywhere when they die; rather, they believe that they continue to walk beside the herd that they belonged to in life, merely in spirit form. To turn one's back on a fellow centaur -- a fellow member of the World Herd -- is to risk being driven out of the herd in death as well as in life. If you can't depend on your herdmates, you can't depend on anyone. No one is willing to risk keeping a traitorous or selfish herdmate around. This and other stories form the basis of the powerful centaur oral tradition, which most centaurs learn at their mother's knee. Centaur traditions are full of stories about passionate folk heroes, daring matriarch, loyal bands, fierce dominance battles, and the unity of purpose in all of centaurkind, and all centaurs will have half a dozen favorite stories that they can tell off the top of their heads. 

FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER
The history of centaur-twolegger interaction is a very fraught one. In general, centaurs have a difficult time fitting into twolegger society -- literally. Twolegger houses and cities are very much built for people with only two legs, and it shows whenever centaurs try to make their way through twolegger societies, where they're unlikely to even fit through the doors. This causes friction between many centaurs and their twolegged neighbors, and is part of the reason that centaurs tend to keep to themselves and their territories. Even the name they go by showcases this friction: the centaur people call themselves sendaeru or sendaerusen, never centaur or centaurs, but twoleggers have so widely spread the mispronunciation that most centaurs have become completely resigned to being called the wrong names in ethnographies and bestiaries. It's not all one-sided, though; the centaur tendency to challenge the people around them for dominance can make them seem unpleasantly belligerent to other races, even when the centaur in question believes they're paying someone the compliment of seeing them as worthy of challenging. In some areas of the world, this goes beyond mere tension into outright conflict. Some twolegger societies have a history of capturing and enslaving centaurs to be used as beasts of burden; the descendants of those enslaved centaurs have never forgotten -- or forgiven -- this slight. In other places, centaurs are seen as bandits or marauders, and are chased away from twolegger settlements; where centaur territories overlap with farmland or pastures, the conflict can get especially ugly. 

CENTAUR NAMES
Centaurs have a personal name, followed by a herd name, followed by a matrilineal name. While the herd name might change when an individual leaves one herd or joins another, and the personal name might change if the individual feels they have become a different person, the matrilineal name is built from the first few syllables of their mother's name and does not change unless a centaur forswears their matriline (and, consequently, their participation in all centaur society). Centaur personal names do not distinguish between male and female, and are often shortened to a single-syllable nickname among friends and family. 
Personal Names: Saeglopur, Sindradadi, Hea'ahag, Gaeuququn, Qigininga, Vidsini, Sgumasgot, Radljost, Adaedane, Vadedaeul, Laehaehul, Mimalmuin, Seiglaja, 
Herd Names: Bonebreaker, Thunderfoot, Gravelsteady, Roaringrun, Quakemaker, Meadowquick, Hillstrong, Rainracer, Stormkicker, Roadheavy
Matrilineal Names: Vignaschild, Magananschild, Gegelinschild, Deroaderschild, Ljinschild, Qaneschild, Rusulunschild

Centaur (Horsefolk) Traits

Your centaur character has a certain number of traits born from the strength of their body and the strength of their lineage.

Ability Score Increase

With your large, powerful body and your hardy resistance to the elements, your Strength score increases by 2 and your Constitution score increases by 1. However, due to that same large body and the lack of flexibility in your lower half, your Dexterity decreases by 2.

Age

Centaurs reach adulthood around age 17, and can live to be up to 75.

Alignment

Centaurs are typically chaotic good or chaotic neutral. Centaurs value the herd above all else, but that doesn't mean they always respect the herd's rules; if a centaur feels like they can get away with bucking someone else's authority, they're going to try it, just to see if they can. No authority is set in stone, after all, until you've tested it to make sure it can stand up to some resistance. That said, most centaurs are genuinely very community minded; they will take pride in supporting their friends and allies, and they are just as swayed by compassion as any other race of social beings. In the end, however, the people they've come to love and rely on will always come first for a centaur, even a particularly altruistic and generous one. 

Size

Centaurs are big -- especially compared to most two-legged races. A centaur will be between 7 and 10 feet tall, between 500 and 2000 pounds, though this heavily depends on the subrace. Your size is Large. 

Speed

Like the horses they resemble, centaurs can go really, really fast when they want to. In a short sprint, they are almost unmatched by any other race, though over a longer distance they will eventually slow down, and being overburdened can cause a dramatic reduction in speed. Your base walking speed is 60 feet.

Beast of Burden

Bolstered by the strength of their equine half, centaurs are capable of carrying much more than a twolegger of equivalent strength would be by loading themselves up with modified saddle bags or pulling a travois or wagon. Most centaurs have very little qualms about doing so, as it's a common practice among the nomadic centaur herds; however, centaurs with a family history of being enslaved by twoleggers may balk at the notion of allowing even a friendly twolegger to use them like a beast of burden. Your carrying capacity is doubled.

Not Built for This

As a large four-legged being, the cities of twoleggers just aren't built with your body type in mind. At best, you'll have to spend the entire time bent over at the waist to avoid the low ceilings; at worst, you're going to end up kicking something over or stepping on someone because they got behind you at the wrong moment. Therefore, when entering or moving around inside twolegger buildings, you must roll a Dexterity saving throw to determine whether or not you can do so without getting stuck, getting squashed, or knocking something (or someone) over.

Oral Tradition

If there's one thing centaurs love to do, it's tell stories about their people, especially their ancestors. Every centaur can name half a dozen of their matrilineal ancestors off the top of their head, and they'll have stories extolling the mighty deeds of each one. Even besides that, every centaur knows the basics of the centaur mythological cycle -- the unity of the World Herd, the fantastic exploits of the trickster-spirit Laughing Flint, the songs of wayfinding, and the cautionary tales about twoleggers bearing honeyed words and saddles. All centaurs have advantage on Intelligence (History), Intelligence (Religion), or Wisdom (Survival) checks concerning their personal family history, centaur mythology, or navigation over long distances.

Kicks Like A Mule

A kick from a horse can cave in someone's skull -- and that goes double for a kick from a centaur. A strike from a centaur's hooves counts as an attack by a natural weapon. It will do 1d6 bludgeoning damage, and a centaur has proficiency on melee attacks involving kicking at an enemy. 

Languages

You can speak Common and speak, read, and write Equque, the language of centaurs. Equque is guttural and humming, spoken heavily through the nose, with hard consonants and a tendency for reduplication of syllables and consonant sounds; its writing system is composed of broad, short strokes and half-circle markings which can be drawn by hand or with a hoof in the dirt. Due to the divide between centaur society and twolegger society, while you can speak Common, you have never been taught to read or write it. 

Subraces

Divided by distance and environment, the four subraces of centaur -- draeur, olgur, heidur, and smahesdur, also known as coldblood, warmblood, hotblood, and iceblood -- are well adapted for their respective climates and lifestyles. Choose one of these subraces.