Nuars are one of the many species that trace their origin to Elaris, as they bear a close resemblance to the minotaurs known to have developed on that world. Despite beginning the era after the Gap with no true trace to their claimed home world and living only in the Origin System, the desire of nuars to build a place for themselves, coupled with a natural aptitude for complex patterns and structures, has led them to spread far and wide as explorers, colonists, troops, and engineers. Nuars prove quick to adapt to local customs, and many spend much of their adulthood far from any other members of their species.
Physical Description
Nuars are generally described as being pale minotaurs, and this is a fair (if oversimplified) description. Short by minotaur standards, a typical nuar stands between 7 and 7-1/2 feet tall, and their sturdy frames and sizeable horns cause them to average between 260 and 350 lbs. They're bipedal and hooved, with strong, nimble hands. Most nuars have tails, which range from short tufts to long, flexible ropes that nearly reach the ground, but this trait isn't universal. Nuars are covered in short, thick hair, with longer, shaggier hair common at the crown of the head and sometimes along the spine and at the tail-tip, wrists, and ankles.
Nuars of all gender grow between two to eight horns, with two or four being most common. These horns generally grow from the upper back of the skull and sweep out and then forward, allowing them to be used effectively in close combat. The horns begin growing shortly after birth and reach full length after roughly a decade of aging (often seen as a sign a nuar is an adult). Nuars with more than two horns generally have two of typical length, with the rest being shorter (and often curving in different directions). Nuars with three or five horns are rare, but not unknown, roughly as common as humans born with eyes of different colors. Among nuars with odd-numbered horns, roughly half have more on one side of their head than the other, and half have a central horn growing forward from their forehead.
Nuar horns are made of dense keratin (the same material that makes up their hooves, nails, and hair) with honeycombed patterns of dentin and microscopic tunnels of enamel (the same material their teeth are made of), which also coat the outside of the horn. New enamel is produced at the root of the horn if the outer sheath is damaged, allowing horns to repair and regrow, though severe damage can be permanent. While nuars have nerve endings in the flesh around the base of their horns, they have no feeling within the horns themselves, which are dense and tough enough to survive exposure to vacuum. Indeed, many nuar armor suits leave their horns exposed to allow for easy use in combat without damaging the armor.
Though nuars are generally described as white in coloration, this description is also a simplification. Most have typical arctic or desert coloration with white, light gray, cream, and tan most common, but some also have dark bellies, palms, and/or noses. Most nuars have pink or red eyes, with a much smaller number displaying bright blue, green, or yellow irises. Roughly 1 in 20,000 nuars have radically different coloration with red, blue, and even purple hair and skin.
Nuar brains are particularly adept at visualizing complex patterns and can memorize twists, turns, and interlocking shapes more easily than lists of names, abstracted historic dates, or purely philosophical ideas. Many nuars use their aptitude for patterns to excel as engineers, artists, and navigators; others delve into more esoteric subjects by constructing “memory mazes” within their heads, envisioning an imaginary labyrinth and placing key ideas or facts in specific turns and twists of the metaphorical structure.
Home World
Most nuars consider Elaris to be their home world, though very little evidence of their life before the gap exists. While pre-Gap records have very few references to nuars as a species, there are occasionally notes referring to the “legacy of Nuar,” or “Nuar the Minotaur Prince of Elaris” capitalized as a proper name, in some of the last histories written of Elaris prior to the first years of the Gap. While that alone is far from definitive, when the Gap ended, there were nuars only in the Origin System, and the majority were on the ark ship Arsalis Prime. Many of those on the ship lived in quarters clearly designed for nuar physiology, and often with artifacts that can be traced to the coastal regions of the Elaris. Combined with a total lack of signs of nuar-focused cities or settlements anywhere, including on Elaris, has caused great confusion on whether or not it truly is their original home or not.
Of course, there are competing, less-well-supported theories on where nuars come from. Several fringe academics claim nuars more likely came from the worlds that were blown up to form the The Grand Ring, with the lack of evidence of such a beginning attributed to that very destruction. Though there's little to nothing to suggest this is the case, rumors claim the existence of secret nuar strongholds at the center of vast maze fortresses within rocks in the The Grand Ring. Such stories are often popular with nuars themselves, as they suggest a place where original nuar culture and history might be preserved, even as the majority of nuars treat the stories as little more than wishful thinking.
While a few nuars can be found in nearly any district of Arsalis Prime, with some even hanging onto family holdings in the otherwise humancentric Tatari region of the Deck, the largest congregation lives within the Bridge neighborhood of Labyr, more popularly known as The Maze. The mazelike structures of coolant systems, filters, air pumps, and access ducts are less confusing for nuars, with their strong natural sense of direction and ability to visualize complex patterns, than for other species. It's not so much that nuars feel drawn to living within the labyrinthine guts of the station, merely that it doesn't impede them, so there's much less competition for living space in and around Conduit. Nuars can gather in sections of The Maze even other residents can't easily find, either paying discount rates—like for air, water, power, and square footage—or directly accessing things they need from unclaimed infrastructure piping.
Society and Alignment
When the Gap ended, nuars were aware of their names, careers, relationships with others, and little else. Cultures with long pre-Gap histories, such as humans, elves, lashuntas, and kasathas, could look back to records describing their ancient kingdoms, myths, gods, heroes, and wars; however, nuars had no such stretch of history to model their society on. Some sought to build their own paths and traditions from the clues found in their homes, while others quickly adopted the customs and behaviors of non-nuar neighbors. The relatively short history of nuars since the Gap has revolved around either discovering more of who they once were or building new frameworks upon which to build their way of life.
First Steps
At birth, nuars weigh roughly 15 pounds and stretch more than two feet long from hoof to crown of head. Though gangly and awkward at first, they can walk within a few hours, feed themselves within a few days, and can master as many as 50 words and even craft two-word sentences within a month. This relatively quick development allows nuars traveling with their family to have numerous children with them, as it isn't necessary for a parent to dedicate their time caring for the young for a prolonged period.
While many nuars are raised with their family's customs and local traditions and language introduced in their day-to-day lives, some nuar communities prefer to restrict what their young are exposed to. One line of thought believes that the inherent nature of nuars can be found by the behavior of their newborns showing preferences for specific foods, colors, temperatures, or other basic elements from which more complex entertainments and traditions can be built. There's considerable debate whether such efforts are effective, not the least because different groups of nuars consider different ideas neutral. One group might only use items that are black and white when decorating a newborn nuar's room, while others might employ a spectrum of colors but avoid patterns and textures. While some groups claim to have discovered some “essential” element of nuar nature by observing the preferences of young ones, such trends are rarely duplicated by different groups trying the same methodology.
Young nuars begin to show interest in various arts and careers by the age of two and often enter formal training at this point. A nuar reaches their full height by eight years but retains a gangly frame until they hit adulthood roughly four years later. Nuars that are adult height but not yet fully filled out are often called tallings, and they might help with their parents' vocations, care for younger siblings, and try their hand at dozens of different life paths and potential career goals before settling on something they find fulfilling.
The Maze of Life
Once a nuar is an adult, they often seek a sense of connection to a broader community than that of their caregivers. A desire to wander and see what lies beyond familiar walls is commonplace and often results in a nomadic existence many nuars call the Maze of Life. Some nuar scholars feel this wanderlust is a result of nuar brains quickly grasping complex patterns and shapes, with everything they know as youth becoming too familiar and simple to satisfy their desire for intricacy in adulthood. Others feel the tendency of adult nuars to leave home for long stretches indicates there's some crucial cultural touchstone in their lives that's missing, and, lacking an ancient history to guide in fulfilling it, many nuars become explorers in a subconscious desire to connect with a missing part of their culture.
While not all nuars leave their homes as adults, the idea of the Maze of Life is a popular one. Growing originally from a personal legend more than a century ago, nuars often use it to refer to seeking a balance between what an individual wishes to do and what their circumstances require or allow them to do. Anyone dissatisfied with their job, or who wants to see sights on distant worlds, or struggles to create art they enjoy is often said to be wandering the Maze of Life, and this is considered a normal and acceptable part of being an adult.
For many nuars, the Maze of Life results in finding some other culture or settlement that speaks to them. Many nuars enjoy the aesthetics and traditions of places with strong orc and half-orc influences, including Apostae and places within the Veskarium where orcs have settled over the generations since the Drift became accessible.
Personal Legend
Nuars are a people with no gods to call their own, no ancient history, no pre-Gap history or sagas or poems, and at most one great ancient hero. While Nuar, the Minotaur Prince of Elaris, is generally accepted as being a historic figure connected (somehow) to the ancient past of the nuar species, little is known about him beyond notes of his existence shortly before the Gap destroyed or muddled all other records. In short, while nuars have a few centuries of post-Gap exploits and records to draw from, they lack deeper roots and, in some cases, feel a need to fill that void. While some nuars do so by adopting another culture's traditions, history, and art, others build their own individual version of the ancient past known as a personal legend.
A personal legend is a specific nuar's version of what ancient nuar culture looked like. It may include lists of nuar gods, great moments in nuar culture that sparked nuar-specific traditions, nuar folk music styles, and long, written chains of nuar settlements becoming cities, then nations, only to collapse or be conquered and rise again centuries alter. Rather than being based on any scholarly evidence that such things happened, each nuar's personal legend is simply how they imagine things to have gone. A nuar might well borrow elements from other planet's histories and settlements' customs, adding them however desired to the nuar's own record of what might have been.
While outsiders often refer to nuar personal legends as fake or imaginary, such labels miss the point as far as the nuars who craft them are concerned. Most nuars see personal legends as more akin to poetry than history—a crafted story that exists to teach lessons, espouse ideas, and give context to holidays and memorials. It doesn't matter to a nuar if their personal legend is factual, as long as it feels like an authentic expression. The idea that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it reverberates with many nuars, who simply lack any records of their pre-Gap history to learn from. By creating a series of folk tales to teach their children and explain their opinions to friends and allies, many nuars hope to build a strong foundation for future generations to build upon.
It's common for a given group of nuars to share a personal legend, at least in broad strokes, as a linchpin for community engagement. Some nuar personal legends have become so popular they're now more than a century old, with nuars on a dozen worlds all referring to them while being aware they were crafted by a post-Gap member of their species. Some of the most popular personal legends have names that create cultural movements, such as the creation myth How the Minotaurs Were Bleached, which combines a great deal of gnomish First World lore with orc mythology to tell an entirely apocryphal story of the First Twelve Nuar, and how each gave up one color to help build a new world for their kind. While Twelvists all know none of the details of that legend are true, it does nothing to quench the delight of their children when they receive a gift of a specific color on the twelfth night of each month.
Names
There's a comparatively short list of “authentic” nuar names that represent every name held by a nuar when the Gap ended, and a few names consistently show up in reference to nuars in the muddled, scrambled records from the Gap. As with so much of nuar culture, their naming conventions seem to have developed during the Gap and thus are nearly entirely lost to that galactic knowledge blank. Some scholastic work has attempted to reclaim names drawn from minotaur culture, applying rules evolved from existing nuar names and how linguistic drift might have changed minotaur terms into nuar names. Nuars also often take names from orc and half-orc sources, and many borrow names from friends of the family or local persons of note.
Since most “official” nuar names tend to be two syllables long and begin and end with consonants, names that match that pattern are more often adopted by nuar communities— though few nuars feel constrained by this general trend. Nuars make no distinction between names based on gender, and sometimes take a name from another society that's associated with a different gender than their own. Young nuars often select a name for themselves upon leaving the safety and control of their parent's home, and nuar settlements consider using the old name an insult since that rejects the nuar's right to self-identify.
Sample Names
Some sample nuar names include Durnat, Fernin, Garendor, Gorak, Hallen, Jodat, Kallar, Kantol, Lurjok, Lonorok, Maoa, Mothor, Narfendol, Nuaz, Purken, Quar, Rarken, Roguff, Sakkar, Trag, Tykin, Ulgar, Vurok, and Zarnen.
Vital Stats
Average Height 7–8 ft.
Average Weight 260–350 lbs.
Age of Maturity 13 years
Maximum Age 90+2d20 years
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