Dog-Folk

Dog-folk have human bodies, short furry tails about 2 feet long, and dog heads. Their short coats run from tan to black, rarely white, usually in one color with paler touches on muzzle, hands and feet, and an occasional spotted individual. Head hair grows long, typically a shade darker than the coat and graying with age, and is worn straight or braided. Their eyes are humanlike, blue, brown or green. Hands and feet are furred on top with dark leathery palms and soles.

They fight with the same weapons humans do, often silver or crimson steel ones in case of lycanthropes, and wheellock pistols are common among warriors. Priests and warriors abound, with wizards and rogues not unusual; dog-folk rangers always pick a lycanthrope, typically werewolves, as their hated foe. Nearly all the realm's knights and nobles ride dire wolves or lupasi as beast riders, and they almost never use firearms, which spook their mounts and are thought dishonorable. White-furred dog-folk are often born spellcasters and are usually taken in and trained by mages or priests.

Their senses are remarkable. They have 60-foot infravision. They spot a werewolf in any form 99% of the time and recognize other dog-folk in unusual forms 15% of the time. They gain +4 on saves to notice invisible creatures and automatically roll whenever one comes within 10 feet, and each round it stays that close; this tells them only that something is near, not where. The same sense notices ethereal beings such as ghosts or phase spiders and distinguishes them from invisible ones, though without combat advantage.

All have blind-fighting free and tracking at half Wisdom (rounded up), full Wisdom if they spend a proficiency slot, or Wisdom +6 for rangers. They know any race by scent automatically and an individual met before with an Intelligence check, at -1 or -2 amid perfume or strong smells. Their noise detection starts at 35% and grows 2% per level; thieves start at 35% (the usual 15% plus 20% racial), add the 2% per level, and may also spend their regular skill points on it. The price of such sharp senses is -2 on saves against smell- or sound-based attacks, such as a ghast's stench, stinking cloud, a banshee's wail or a harpy's song.

Wolfsbane repels them and is deadlier to them than to humans. Swallowed, it acts as Type J poison (fail the save and die, succeed and lose 20 hit points), though their noses almost always warn them in time. Injected, it acts as Type P, and a failed save cuts every ability score in half for 1d3 days.

Some sages think dog-folk descend from gnolls crossed with humans; others call them an offshoot of true werewolves, an idea they find offensive since they loathe every kind of lycanthrope. Most are good, some neutral, a few evil. Typically they are loyal to friends and a little rude to strangers, testing their patience. Once steppe nomads, they now hold a fairly advanced kingdom on the frontier coast modeled on the frontier baronies, copying human arts, nobility, inheritance law and philosophy. All but the lowest classes use a courtly language, while peasants keep the old racial tongue of barks and howls.

Trade drives the kingdom, which boasts a large, varied middle class, though most commoners farm or herd. Apart from adventurers, the dog-folk are settled now, but the nomad-era beast riders survive as an upper class close to nobility. A strong feudal government can raise a defense army within days and patrols the borders against goblinoids. Towns of wood and stone homes cluster around a keep; once every resident could shelter inside, but war refugees have swelled them beyond what the keeps could protect.

Family life mirrors human custom: couples marry before having children, both parents raise them, and the young have some say in marriage and career though family pressure counts. Nobles sometimes marry beneath them, yet the middle class frowns on noble-peasant matches.

They produce wine, grain, dairy goods, cloth, wool and art, and mine amber and sapphires, sending much of it through a free merchant city in the heart of sacred turtle-folk lands. They get on well with humans, elves and dwarves, have only border quarrels with the cat-folk, dislike the shrieking phanatons, consider skinkin, scalewardens, gator men and turtle-folk savages of varying degrees, dislike goblinoids, and hate evil canines, werewolves most of all.