Ashen Stars – The Tavak

Another sneak peak at an Ashen Stars species, bought to life by Jerome.

The Tavak

At an average seven feet in height and topping the scales at close to half a ton, you are a tavak, the most physically robust of the seven peoples. Descended from armadillo-like creatures of your homeworld, Tav, you are covered with hairy plates of natural armor. Piercing retractable claws wait within your long, wrinkled fingers. Your culture transformed when your ancestors discovered the warp corridors and reached the stars. Before that, your people were peaceful, placid insectivores,  surviving through an instinct for social harmony. When they reached space, they found it a cold and forbidding environment, wracked by warfare. They also discovered that their naturally armed and armored body morphologies gave them a physical edge over their rival peoples. Over the course of a generation, they transformed themselves into formidable warriors. Yet even as they embraced the art of combat, they held fiercely onto their traditions of spiritual serenity and political coexistence.

Humans take credit for brokering the formation of the Combine, but it is the Tavak philosophy that provides it with its guiding principles.

By default, you are calm, centered and even somewhat sleepy. Only when danger threatens to you arouse yourself with the warrior’s mantra and transform into a furious fighting machine. You end the fight with decisive but not excessive force, then return to your state of lowered excitation. Or that is what happens under ideal circumstances. In fact, the quick transition from peace to war has left you susceptible to battle frenzy. When in this state, your fury is a terrible thing to witness, a danger to foe and friend alike.

Translators render your speech as lilting and sometimes painfully slow. Fortunately, if you are a typical Tavak, you are a being of few words. When you have something important to say, you say it. Most of the time you lapse into a meditative state of alert tranquility. You have had to alter your conversational style to be understood by outsiders. Discussions among Tavak consist mostly of grunts and nearly imperceptible gestures, which are somehow able to resolve complex issues into a happy consensus in a few quicksilver instants.

Tavak names are always two syllables long, following a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. The Tavak language uses only a limited number of consonants, mostly hard. Pick a name from the list given in Appendix 1

Boosts: History (Tavak), Interrogation, Reassurance, Athletics, Scuffling, Shooting

Suitable Drives: Altruism, Atonement, Bleedism, Chronicler, Combinism, Comradeship, Entrepreneurial, Exploration, Footloose, Justice-Seeker, Nowhere Else To Go, Professionalism, Pursued, Programming, Role Model, Scientific Inquiry, Sexual Adventure, Something To Prove, Tech Hound

Other Modifiers: Hit Threshold +1, hand to hand Claw attack +1damage

Unique Drives:Meditative Reconciliation

Species-Specific  Abilities: Resist Battle Frenzy

Cybernetic Compatibilities: Berserker, Mesodermal Jumper, Motobooster

Cybernetic Clashes: Bad Liver, Neurojolter, Nightvision,

Viroware Affinities: Grobig, Latency Suppression, Regenerate

Viroware Susceptibilities:Skeletal Fluidity, Keratized Epidermis, Tiresias