Flawder

A flawder stands upright like a snail balanced on its foot, though its shell lacks the familiar spiral. Every tribe wears a distinctive shell coloring and pattern, and the shells are often lovely. Two eyes sway at the ends of stalks on the head, and beneath them hang two tentacles that serve as hands for eating and for holding tools or weapons. The round mouth holds several rings of blunt teeth. Their own language is musical and pleasant to hear.

Flawder dislike fighting and only do so to protect themselves and their people. Roughly half of any group carries weapons, usually flint daggers; the rest scatter at the first threat and fight only when trapped. Without a weapon a flawder bites for 1d2 points of damage with a -1 penalty to hit. The shell is remarkably hard: a flawder is AC 7 from the front but AC -3 against blows that land on its shell.

Each 20 flawder are led by a 2 HD leader with the spellcasting of a 2nd-level wizard, and each tribe answers to a 3 HD chief who casts as a 3rd-level wizard. Pick their spells at random from abjuration, conjuration/summoning, divination and enchantment/charm. One chief in five (20%) keeps a familiar; roll 1d6 for a crab, lobster, squid, cuttlefish, sea horse or ordinary fish. These familiars are 6 to 18 inches long, use the find familiar spell statistics, see in a wide arc and can pick up distant underwater sounds and vibrations. Lobsters, crabs and some fish can nip for 1d2 points, while cuttlefish and squid can squirt ink that blinds foes for 1d2 rounds.

Tribes are small and always on the move, gliding over the bottom since flawder cannot swim. They breathe only water, and one stranded in air suffocates after 3d4 minutes. The chief's word is law; normally it guides the tribe in search of food, though once in a while it leads an assault on some especially threatening predator. All the leaders' spells are carved into flat shell disks about 6 inches wide, carried in a little net by a common flawder picked for the honor. A tribe may also haul 1d20 more shells inscribed with songs, legends and history.

Each flawder is both male and female. Any two adults can produce a clutch of 3d4 soft eggs, which hatch after 6 weeks; young are 1 to 3 feet tall but otherwise fight as adults and mature in 6 months. Breeding happens year round, and eggs are scattered all over the tribe's range so the race can recover from constant losses. They are wary of most other water peoples but occasionally keep company with aquatic elves, tritons or mermen. A flawder that avoids being eaten can live 40 years.

Flint daggers and inscribed shells are the only things flawder make. Many creatures, including thinking races who do not know or do not care that the flawder are people, hunt them because they taste delicious. Their shells can fetch up to 500 gp, and since they swallow pebbles to grind their food, each has a 10% chance of holding 1d4 uncut gems in its gullet. Taken somewhere free of predators, a tribe breeds explosively, strips every plant from the area, wrecks the local ecosystem and eventually starves.