Shargugh

Pronounced SHAR-guh, these little hairy humanoids stand about 3 feet tall and weigh 30 to 40 pounds. Their long, permanently matted hair is usually walnut brown, though a rare few have dark green locks, and males wear long, scraggly beards. Their skin is dark and ruddy, their features rough yet strangely attractive, with eyes of deep green or amber. They dress in tatters of woven leaves, grass, fur scraps and old cloth and almost never wear shoes. A shargugh can live around 250 years. Besides their native speech they know the druids' secret language, and about 35% also know Common.

A shargugh has a nasty bite, but half of all groups carry daggers or short swords, and any armed group includes at least one silver weapon. Every shargugh is a deadly stone thrower, carrying 1d4+1 stones and hurling one per round (range 20/40/60) at +3 to hit for 1d4 damage.

They pass through brambles and undergrowth as easily as druids, hide in woods with 90% success, climb trees and vines like a thief climbing walls (75%), and both pick pockets and move silently at 85%. Five times a day each can use transport via plants, limited to 600 yards but always arriving exactly where intended within that range.

Mischievous by nature, they pilfer valuables from any outsider who does not buy them off with food or drink, and they defend their woods fiercely, refusing to tolerate careless destruction. They avoid melee with stronger foes, preferring to filch weapons and spell components with their quick fingers and plant travel, then throw stones from safety.

Shargugh live alone or in families, usually two parents and one child. The young one is a helpless infant 25% of the time; otherwise it is old enough to have every adult ability. Each individual or family claims about 24 miles of woodland. They get along with good and neutral forest dwellers and even tolerate evil ones, so long as these neither harm the woods nor try to rule them. Treants, unicorns, dryads and centaurs can usually count them as allies.

A shargugh and its forest share one life force, each strengthening the other, and the shargugh tends its land by pruning, harvesting fruit and fending off threats. It never leaves willingly; forced out, it sickens and dies within one or two days. A forest that loses its shargugh is cursed and barren for seven years. Existing plants survive but bear no fruit or seed, and nothing new grows. Only a remove curse from a druid of 12th level or higher, or a wish, restores the land early.

Young shargugh never truly leave home. Either the child stays until its parents die and inherits the land, or parents and child settle at opposite ends of the territory, which eventually becomes two new territories sharing a border.