Tortle
This race has no settlements but wanders the planet, usually near the coasts. They are rare to find in numbers, rarely do they settle in any city. Some become valued for their navigational and historical knowledge.
Most are found near the coasts across the world, they avoid areas in the sub-artic latitudes, they prefer the tropical and temperate seas.
Every individual is considered an adventurer.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Bipedal reptilians with a hard shelled carapace and scaly skin. Their heads are small and beaked, they have 4 fingers and a thumb. They have the ability to pull their limbs and head inside their shell to protect their head, the limbs can pull in and their exposed skin remaining is the thickest and has no major arteries or veins exposed so they can be attacked but take little damage.
Biological Traits
Tortles are reptilians like the lizard folk and have a different brain make up unique to their race. Their metabolism is slow so they like warmer climes to operate in. Their body mass is 1/3rd their shell and it is thick bony and chitin composite that resists physical damage, but can be effected by acids, poisons and flame. Tortles can store oxygenated blood in a lining in their lungs, this combined with their metabolisms allow them to go without breathing for about an hour. They will use this to ford rivers or go hunting underwater. They can do this for about 60 minutes before needing to surface for air.
Genetics and Reproduction
Tortles lay eggs, between one up to a dozen. They are geared to give birth in their last years, so they only ever have one clutch. Eggs take about six to eight weeks to develop before the female lays the eggs. The eggs incubate for 3 months.
Growth Rate & Stages
Tortles hatch from the eggs with help from the parents. At birth they are 20" tall and fully formed. Tortles have a weak psychic link with their parents that only persists for about a year, then fades as that part of the brain grows and develops. During that year they quickly learn language, emotions, and other basic intuitive social cues through this link, even while asleep. as the child grows up over the next year the parents are constantly teaching the child (or children) survival techniques, combat, how to navigate how to read and figure. Within 2 or 3 years the parents will die of old age, possibly drained from constant psychic connection.
After the parents death their children divide up their possessions and will establish an area where they hunt, gather and explore for the next decade or so. around the age of 10 to 12 they usually have more of a need to explore than belong and begin traveling the world. They will do so until they reach the end of their lives when they will enter heat and begin to be able to detect mates.
Ecology and Habitats
As reptilians they prefer warm climates of Alterra. most are found in the equatorial zone and in warm coastal waters, jungles, forests, plains and savanna, and sometimes deserts. They do not like to travel to high elevation or colder areas, so they may leave more seasonal areas as summer fades.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Tortles are omnivores and have a varied diet. They prefer fish and sea food, often raw, but many learn to cook and can then eat more terrestrial fare. They eat insects and other small prey they can trap with little preparation. They also eat vegetation preferring leaves and shoots, tubers and roots. They don't eat woody foods or fungi.
Tortles are raised to be good hunters, and are very patient with their prey. They are also trappers and snare small prey in nets, snares, and pits.
Tortles are not farmers, they are browsers and will generally pick what they find as they travel.
Biological Cycle
If caught in a cold clime they cannot escape they can hibernate, and will usually dig a protective den and seal it up, their survival chance is low as they are hoping their metabolism will stop and they can get by on sleeping for months, though that isn't certain. The most they can hibernate is 5 months, which in the far north or south is probably too long.
Tortles basically are adolescents until age 100 or so and then develop full sexual maturity.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Tortles are loners, and do not crave social connection. They are survivors and will join groups because it is to their benefit. They will form friendships and relationships but they rarely feel bonded and need to stay with an individual to remain their friend. More social creatures will find this cold and off putting that a valued comrade will just walk out one day without saying good bye then come back years or decades later like they just left.
The only structure that may persist is that between siblings, where the first to hatch may take a more leadership role among their clutch when younger. This older sibling will be who the others mimic and learn from when younger. So if they develop a strong role in their adopted home the others may take it up too. (IE a specific class or job, habit or conviction). However, once they have gone their separate ways they will look to their own council to survive.
Facial characteristics
Tortles have small heads compared to their bodies. Their skulls are thick and squarish. They have wide set but forward facing eyes. The mouth is broad but their chins are thin. Their heads may have scales, knobs and bumps from plates or chitin under the skin. For creatures unfamiliar with Tortles their faces can be inscrutable for emotional states, but unlike lizard folk tortles have a much more varied emotional life.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Tortles can be found around the world in tropical and in the summers in temperate regions. Most will be found close to the coasts, but it is not unusual to find them significantly inland. Encounters in cities will be with the very old and the very young. Mated Tortles may find a city that is fortified and secure to raise their young for the short time to raise them. Tortles under the age of 15 will be most likely found in a city before they wonder off. Most raised in a city will know it's language, customs, and may pick up a trade before they are given to travel. Some will join up with trade caravans or trade convoys to begin their journey. If a colonization effort is underway they may choose to join those settlers in far away lands. Most tortles have a migration pattern and they may become familiar with a region; a large jungle, a river system, or canyon system and travel to explore every nook and cranny of that local. As such they become valuable guides.
Average Intelligence
Tortles have human problem solving level intelligence. Their armored shell and mental model of the world makes them patient and they have a better than human level of introspection and wisdom from a long life of varied experience freed from routine and need for structure.
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Tortle senses are on par for with a human, have color vision, but also have additional senses. One additional sense is a taste bud variety for sensing poisons and toxins which helps them choose which plants or organs to eat. Another is pheromone sense that allows them to recognize other Tortles in heat. This sense may not develop until their 10th decade.
Civilization and Culture
Naming Traditions
Tortles are not hung up on their identity and will make up their own names, usually no more than two syllables sometimes. They may change their name throughout their life, or take a name for one group of people and a different name for another group of people. Makes it hard to know when two groups to know if they are talking about the same individual.
Beauty Ideals
Tortles are enticed by location novelty, and personal novelty. They want to see what is over the next hill or if their is another island in the chain, or another branch of a river.
Gender Ideals
Tortles are effectively genderless and do not peer group based on gender or have gender roles up until they mate.
Once mated they both become much more protective of their lives, eggs, homes, and possessions, and each other. Females will guard the eggs night and day, sleeping intermittently when the male is around. The male will be patrolling the clutch area and looking for food for both of them. After the eggs hatch they sleep very little and spend all of their time with their children, giving them all the food and having only crumbs and scraps as both their bodies begin to slow down. within a few months of birth their children will be gathering their own meals.
Courtship Ideals
at around a century Tortles develop a sense of pheromone smell. They will pick up the lightest traces of each other and will feel compelled to follow the scent of the opposite sex, this may take months but eventually a pair will meet. Usually there are only two in any range of each other's scent trail, so they are usually pair bonded upon meeting.
That meeting is usually a long encounter lasting days where they trade stories of their travels, they pick a location that would be the most secure then they travel together protecting each other as they venture there. It might take years to reach their destination, they become tightly bonded during their migration and will not separate from each other under any circumstance.
Once they have arrived at their secure location they either find lodgings, a compound they can defend and find food readily. They will both fortify it and set traps and warnings around the location. They will mate daily until the female become pregnant and then she will lay her eggs in a secured den, room or location which she will not leave until they hatch.
Relationship Ideals
Tortles are friendly survivors. They do not view most sentient beings as threats, but as possible acquiescence to make. If threatened they will fight, retreat to their shell, or escape. They dislike parting with their few possessions and threats need to be neutralized. They don't usually value money, but tools and weapons that make survival and travel easier. Once they make a friend they will never forget them, once they make an enemy they won't forget them either, but they are flexible and can make alliances with those that wronged them in the past if they have some credible evidence they can be trusted. They do not need proximity to have relationship, and feel as connected to someone they met once a continent away as they do someone who may live next door or they go on adventures with. Continued travel and exploration is their primary drive, they will continue on when their friends settle down. Even tortles who may have been granted lands as a reward will never settle them, they might trade it for a vehicle or cypher that make travel easier.
Their mates however are a different deal. Once they pair off they are bonded for the rest of their lives. They will never consider leaving a mate, leaving them behind, or allowing any harm to come to them. They feel the same way with their children and will violently attack any threat to their families, and without any remorse.
Average Technological Level
Tortles are not very technically savvy and avoid any reliance on technology. If raised in a city they may pick up a trade or skill, but they don't join guilds, academies or other organizations that require them to stay put for long. They usually lack the ability to craft complicated items with their own equipment, or carry lots of gear. A tortle can learn to use a tool or weapon given time and instruction, and some become sailors, or learn to pilot some vehicles.
Their best technology is map making and navigation by the stars, currents and winds. They are excellent navigators and weather forecasters. Tortle navigational journals are often sought after, some are over two or three centuries old passed down from parent to child.
Major Language Groups and Dialects
Korero Anga is the language of the Tortles, sometimes referred to as Aquan by outsiders. This language phonetic and written. The written components are largely symbolic and represent nouns. Connectors represent verbs or adjectives. Their language is a form of a map and could be written in any direction as the symbol + Connector gives the meanings and relationships between nouns. It is a journalistic shorthand to record their travels and help them remember. This makes it hard to translate as one needs the author's context to decipher it. Tortle journals that do end up in other's hands are often highly annotated in other languages to fill in the context as the translator can determine.
Tortles usually learn one or more other languages of the peoples they meet and frequent as they travel, common, Soki languages, Elvish and dwarvish are the most likely.
Common Etiquette Rules
Tortles range from un-mannered to highly mannered depending on where they grew up. If they are from a city they will have that culture's mannerisms, if they were raised in the wild they will probably have little if any acculturation. However, they are patient and eager to learn new things so they will quickly adopt manners of their hosts or comrades.
Common Dress Code
Tortles are nudists for the most part. Their undeveloped genitals are hidden from view, they don't have strong gender roles or traits until late in life so for the most part clothing is an annoyance. To carry their possession they may have an apron or straps to clamp items to. They cannot reach their backs so they do not want to put anything there. Their belly is the most accessible place for their hands to reach. They don't wear armor, but may use a shield, buckler or may have gloves or grieves. They don't wear shoes or boots and these could affect how they pull their legs and arms into their shell for protection.
Culture and Cultural Heritage
There is not Tortle culture in the way that other societies do, they don't have a deep shared history, and most of their pre-arc civilization is lost to time, the name of their planet and what it was like is largely apocryphal gleaned from others writings not long after the first settlers established themselves. Their culture is personal, a mix of where they were raised and where they have been and the knowledge shared by their parents.
Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals
Because tortles don't belong in most cultures specifically they may or may not adopt cultural traditions of their birth location. The passing of knowledge from parent to child is their main connection. This formative period and the few yeas after their deaths is when a Tortle will form their initial baseline for the world around them.
Once a Tortle's parents pass away they divide up their possessions among their siblings and then carve the names of their parents on the deceased shells and their progeny at that time (names are fluid) then bury them in the compound or local commoner cemetery. If the local tradition requires other funeral rites then they will do that.
Common Taboos
Never harm, threaten, or insult a child creature. Instinctively tortles are protective of young. They will avoid harming sentient young. An overriding emotional imprint from their parents at their late stage during mating effects them as well.
Tortles will become protective and aggressive if a child is injured or threatened in their presence. They may not know what to do next after the threat is removed but they will be agitated.
History
Tortles come from the small world of Hune. A planet tidally locked to a dwarf star the planet had a hot side and a dark side. Tortles evolved in the tropical zone of the world and developed their civilization there. As they began to overpopulate the habitable zone of the planet their culture developed mobile forms of communications and a decentralized society of peering and traveling information. They never built true cities and they never developed heavy industry they did discover how to organize into migrating information carriers, and much of the academic knowledge spread this way.
Tortles made contact with Atlantean survey teams who colonized the dark side of the planet to extract ores and gasses from the planet. Introduced to space technology they Tortles made bargains to become explorers and to see the stars. Over time their planetary population began to dwindle as more and more went off world never to return or mate. The Star Walkers intervened and helped establish a tortle space program so they could explore in a more organized way and find their way back home to mate to bring equilibrium. It is rumored that long before the exodus Tortle colony ships were sent on a one way voyage of discovery to neighboring galaxies
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Tortles get along with most of the creatures they encounter, and are rarely aggressive, suspicious or put off by the unusual nature of any intelligent creatures. They are not xenophobic or wary of others. When threatened with robbery or violence they will defend themselves and generally their strength and natural armor will convince most aggressors this will not be a quick fight. Other nomadic raiders such as humans, orcs, goblins, bugbears, may have legends of meeting a lone turtle person who they tried to rob but ended up being both ineffective at hurting them and getting their warriors bested by this lone creature. years later they ran in to it again and it was friendly and willing to trade.
Tortles will make lasting friendships, even though they will not be around and they don't forget faces. Even rivals and past enemies will be greeted as if they only just spoke. Tortles are willing to join forces to combat a threat or investigate a mystery just to find out what is going on. They will take spoils and convert them into either easily transported weapons, tools, or vehicles for their travels.
Individual tortles have traveled far off the beaten trade routes and are sought out for their knowledge about distant lands and what knowledge their forebears may have passed on. Tortles may dictate from memory the outlines of coasts or river systems they've explored and built up a map in their heads of the terrain, monsters, settlements, and other notes.
Origin
Hune
Origin/Ancestry
Planet Hune
Lifespan
150 years
Average Height
5'-0" to 6'-0"
Average Weight
450 lb
Average Physique
Tortles are 1/3rd shell and have a lot of muscle mass to move it around. They don't have much fat reserves and because of their propensity to travel they are physically toned. On average they are stronger than humans, but offset by their mass so they have about the same dexterity.
Body Tint, Colouring and Marking
Tortles come in a variety of colors, most are an ocher-umber brown scales to yellow-grey. Their shell underbelly may be a dull white to yellow. Their back shells are dark brown to green, blue, turquoise, or yellow. The back will have varying patterns and striations as the bone formed and hardened.
Related Ethnicities
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