Guardinal Overview

Guardinals are the native folk of the blessed fields of the upper planes. Most look like handsome, powerful humans with some animal trait: a lion's mane, a flattened muzzle of a face, or pawlike hands. The beastliness varies, and those who linger in the plane of beasts look the most animal. They are rarer even than eladrins or archons, living in small watchful clusters or wandering bands, and at home they are merry and very slow to anger.

All guardinals have infravision and, as spell-like powers, dispel magic, dimension door, a 10-foot-radius protection from evil, and the ability to detect evil (100-foot range), illusion and invisibility. Like paladins they can lay on hands daily, healing hit points equal to their own total, divided among patients as they choose. Iron harms a guardinal only if normal weapons could; silver hurts any guardinal even when enchantment would otherwise be required.

A special telepathy lets them speak with intelligent nonmonstrous beings and with natural animals of every kind (a human, dog or giant eagle, but not a gazer tyrant or catoblepas). No normal or giant animal will attack a guardinal, even under magical compulsion.

Guardinals roam the planes freely. An innate power like probability travel takes one bodily onto the Astral Plane, any gate, portal or conduit will serve, and from anywhere on their home plane they can step directly to a twin paradise of the upper planes, the plane of beasts, or the neutral planes.

Away from home they turn grim. They tolerate no evil at all and travel the wider ring of planes to confront it, even striking the edges of the gray wasteland of despair, the prison plane and a volcanic lower plane to punish the fiends there. Unlike eladrins, who weigh a mortal's free choice heavily, guardinals openly declare themselves and do whatever defeating evil demands.

They build no cities or forts; each settles where it pleases, from gentle river towns to the plane's wilder, lonelier layers. Most are quiet loners in peacetime, yet they band together with military discipline when danger rises. Leonals act as their leaders and rallying points for causes such as toppling an evil prime-world empire, recovering a holy relic stolen by fiends, or watching an organization that may be sliding toward wickedness. Guardinals rarely abandon a cause, and they never lie, cheat or fight needlessly unless a cause is in dire peril.

Mightiest of all is the ancient leonal prince Solvarre, whose power and wisdom rival some lesser gods. He rides with five celebrated companions, the greatest of the avorals, equinals, lupinals, cervidals and ursinals, each far beyond others of its kind.