Loxo

A loxo is an elephant shaped like a person: wrinkled blue-gray skin with sparse coarse hair, thick round limbs, flat feet, stubby fingers, broad ears and tusks. Most striking are its two trunks, each about 2 feet long and ending in three fingerlike tips. Their plain, country-style garments bear repeating geometric prints of rings and lozenges.

Peaceful by nature, loxoth fight hard for land and kin and favor close combat. Arms break down this way: iron maces for 60% (half of whom add shuriken), a heavy club with two throwing clubs for 20%, dirk and shuriken for 10%, and for the last 10% nothing but a footman's mace or an iron-shod tetsubo. Their trunks can hurl shuriken in the same round they swing a melee weapon. When danger comes, half the males guard the females and young while the rest counterattack; charging man-sized or smaller foes, they may trample for 2d8.

Each round its family is in danger, a loxo has a 10% chance (not cumulative) of flying into a berserk fury that grants an extra attack per round, +2 to hit and 10 temporary hit points until the threat ends. A berserk loxo never harms another loxo. One in every ten is a 5th-level fighter serving as lieutenant, and every herd, however large, has a chief who fights as a 7th-level fighter.

By their own histories, loxoth came by starship about 240 years (three generations) ago, a small colony in the eastern grasslands with a few herds pushing on to distant nomad steppes. Natives let them settle in peace, though loxoth still distrust strangers. Only a few dozen tribes exist.

Semi-nomadic herds hold 1-6 families plus 6-24 bachelor males; a family is a male with 1-3 mates and 3-12 calves. Each herd springs from one ship's passengers, sings of that vessel and shares its clothing pattern; when a herd grows too big, a younger leader takes part of it to new land, and kin-herds of one ship remain friends. Males dominate politics and war, but only females become starhelm pilots, and each herd traces descent to the female who flew its ship. A male takes as many mates as he can hold against rivals, all of his own ship's line. Pregnancy lasts 18 months and produces one or two calves, and a loxo may live 200 years.

A male who sees his family die goes rogue 95% of the time, staying berserk, attacking any non-loxo, threatening any loxo who comes close, and losing 1d6 hit points a day until exhaustion kills him.

Artisans shape wood, metal and their dead's ivory, which always becomes sacred heirloom figurines. Strong, clumsy hands forge blunt weapons and dirks; deft trunks do the fine work of jewelry and shuriken. Their metalwork is crude or exquisite with nothing between, so maces and jewelry are possible but swords are not.

Eating up to 100 pounds of plants a day apiece, they tend their pastures carefully, rotate between them and sow grain and fruit trees along their circuit. They trade fine jewelry and occasional spellcasting to dwarves of a great rift for raw materials. A tusk may be worth 250 gp, yet to the loxoth any traffic in tusks, whether theft, purchase or barter, is the gravest of crimes.