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Society
Skinwalkers sometimes weave themselves into other societies, hoping their peculiar talents go unnoticed. They may also be nomads found in lands with wide-open spaces. Groups of skinwalkers hidden among a larger community of non-skinwalkers may regularly gather for lunar rituals or nocturnal pack hunting.
Physical Description
Outwardly human, skinwalkers are virtually indistinguishable from others of the ethnic group into which they are born. Those rare skinwalkers who have bred true for generations tend to have dark eyes, straight dark hair, and richly colored skin. Skinwalkers’ features vary greatly when they shapechange. They gain a bestial visage evoking the creatures they emulate; the snout elongates, teeth become more prominent, claws emerge from fingertips, and skin toughens into hide. Despite their shapechanging abilities, they are not immune to infection from full lycanthropes.
Skinwalkers resemble humans much of the time, but they possess the uncanny ability to transform into bestial humanoids who combine the most fearsome aspects of flesh and fur. Most people believe skinwalkers are half-breeds of lycanthropes, or that they share some slight version of the curse of those creatures. Skinwalker shamans say they are chosen by nature or the gods to be a bridge between the world of humanity and the animal world. The truth may lie somewhere between these two ideas. For indeed, skinwalkers are those with a lycanthrope crouching somewhere in the branches of their family tree. These distant progeny of monstrous werewolves and other creatures of the night have special talents unlike those of most civilized peoples, and they arise randomly among remote humanoid populations as well as within their own secretive sects. A pair of humans may give birth to a skinwalker—the dormant lycanthropic ancestry making itself known in a child neither beast nor human—or a pair of skinwalker parents may produce a skinwalker child, though these couplings can sometimes produce human children as well.
Racial Traits
Adventurers
Often on the move, skinwalkers make for excellent adventurers. Once they become comfortable in a group, most skinwalkers come to see their adventuring allies as their pack or herd.
Names
Skinwalkers born in human and humanoid societies share the naming conventions of the surrounding culture. Skinwalkers born in their own packs typically have names similar to their overarching ethnicities appended with flavorful, animal-inspired appellations such as Bearmaw, Wolftamer, Fangblood, or Owlmarked.
RelationsSkinwalkers mostly populate human settlements and communities. They tend to get along with catfolk, tengus, and members of other animal-like races (including lycanthropes), and are comfortable taking their animalistic forms in the company of these fellows. However, many natural lycanthropes see skinwalkers as weaker, inferior versions of their own kind, and some lycanthropes even take to infecting or even hunting their distant kin.
Alignment and Religion
Skinwalkers tend toward neutral alignments, but may be of any. Many follow the Green Faith or venerate deities with close ties to nature and the animal world, as well as those connected with hunting, transformation, travel, and trickery.
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