Bladeling

Bladelings were once thought to be tieflings, but they are a separate race. About 6 feet tall and human in outline, they have eyes like glowing, purple-tinged chips of glacier ice, and their skin and bones jut out everywhere as sharp edges of wood, ice and steel. There is no soft flesh on them, and their blood looks and flows like oil.

Bladelings dive eagerly into battle, often punching twice with metal-crusted fists for 1d6 each, or wielding almost any weapon. The boldest single out whoever carries the weapons most dangerous to their kind, testing the enemy's strength.

They are immune to rust, acid, all corrosion, and ordinary piercing missiles and edged weapons; only magical or bludgeoning weapons do full damage. Their magical, more-than-flesh bodies suffer only half harm from fire or cold spells. Spells affecting metal work normally, except heat metal, which deals double damage; other heat magic not aimed at metal does nothing.

Once a week a bladeling can unleash a razor storm, blowing off part of its outer skin in a 5-foot-wide spray of blades reaching 15 feet ahead. Anyone in the path takes 3d12, halved by a save vs. breath weapon. Afterward its front torso drops from AC 2 to AC 6, hits there deal double damage, fire and cold spells aimed there do full damage, and its magic resistance falls to 5% until the blades regrow, usually in 1d4 days.

Bladelings harshly discourage anyone prying into their lives. Superstitious and deeply xenophobic, they are polite to strangers met abroad but quickly kill invaders of their home. They can be fighters, priests or conjurers; females may be fighter/priests, males fighter/conjurers. Certain bladelings, usually female, can call on their unknown gods and rise to 10th level as priestesses, ruling society as they see fit.

They live on the fourth layer of a plane of endless war, amid storms of whirling ice and iron blades. Their only known city, Kethrazil, sits in a crimson forest whose pulpy wood (and stranger matter) shields it from the blades. Its people obey their priest-king with fanatical devotion in exchange for some security, and the city produces little besides assassins and wanderers.

Their harsh home teaches them to trust and protect neighbors; priestly feuds sometimes engulf whole districts, but outside threats unite them fast. Immigrants who are now considered natives, they were nearly exterminated on arrival by the plane's rust dragons until magical experiments gave them immunity to rust.