Giff (4e Race)

Giff

From The Spacefarer's Handbook

Also known as Hippo Men, the giff are a minority among races from the Known Spheres. However, among groundlings, they are renowned mercenaries and have established knowledge on spelljamming. Their prowess in firearms is also notable, if not also their suspicion of magic.

Racial Traits

Average Height: 8'5"—9'

Average Weight: 600—650 lbs

Ability Scores: +2 Strength, +2 Constitution or Dexterity

Size: Medium

Speed: 6 squares squares

Vision: Normal

Languages: Common, Giff, and either Dwarvish, Elven, or Draconic

Skill Bonuses: +2 Endurance, +2 Athletics

Mental Fortitude: The giff are known to be incredibly difficult to influence with magic. You have a +5 bonus to Will saves against powers with the Arcane keyword.

Warrior Heritage Proficiency: You gain proficiency in one weapon of your choice.

Stubborn Strength: You move at your normal speed even when it would normally be reduced by armor or a heavy load. Other effects that limit speed (such as difficult terrain or magical effects) affect you normally.

Warrior's Challenge: You gain the Warrior's Challenge racial power.

Warrior's Challenge	Giff Racial Power
For the giff, true combat begins with weapons. Child's play ends and death matches begin. You steel yourself innately for this.
Encounter
Immediate Reaction	Personal
Trigger: You are hit by a weapon attack.
Effect: You gain a +2 to all your attack rolls and defenses until the end of your next turn.
Level 11: +4 to attack rolls and defenses Level 21: +6 to attack rolls and defenses

The giff are a race of humanoid hippo creatures hailing from a planet that only exists in their own inherited stories, one of jungles rife with gunpowder and strange trees that grew armaments. While they pine for their homeland, they are not moping about. They have established themselves as able spacefarers and mercenaries of the highest grade. They do various jobs involving brute force and discovery of new worlds and resources for various clientele. While they are not able users of magic themselves, they are excellent shots and warriors that can complete any crew.

Physical Qualities

The giff are appropriately called "hippo-men." They resemble anthropomorphic hippos. More accurately, they are humanoids sporting the head of a hippo, with strong jaws, and small ears and eyes. Their bodies are large and covered with flexible, chitinous plates for skin, almost like natural armor. Giff are incredibly strong and stocky, due to the density of muscle and bone needed to even maintain their body weight in standing and walking. They have stocky, flat, cylindrical legs and legs, a humanoid torso, and prehensile fingers. Giff come in colors ranging from black to gray to gold, and many have colorful tattoos that leave their bodies a patchwork record of past victories, often highlighting their scars.

Due to the fact that their bodies naturally have such tough skin, giff are not usually wearers of a lot of armor. However, armor to fit giff often requires special tailoring due to their large body type. Usually, giff wear normal clothing like coats and pants that are extremely large. Even these will need to be tailored. Cloths that are durable are preferred, since giff tend to possible destroy clothing they wear easily. More often, giff are fond of functional jewelry and accessories, like goggles. However, they tend to be wary of things that seem too sparkly or gaudy, as those may have magic.

Attitudes and Beliefs

Giff are strong believers in their strength and the art of artillery. They even believe their original home to have been a strange planet where caches of firearm munitions grew like fruit from trees. Their strength and resilient bodies are a great source of pride. They do not take kindly to physical weakness as a result. Someone who gets hurt in a mere fist-fight is seen as weak and soft. These outliers in their society of powerful individuals are shameful. However, giff are not so strict to say they would leave the weak to die, like in goliath society. Rather, they expect a certain level of endurance from everyone. They are therefore a bit careless when it comes to dealing with other races that are "softer" like humans.

Magic is something averse to giff. They do not like arcane powers in the slightest, preferring mundane weapons. The exact reason why stems partially from how most giff are not magically gifted. However, they are open to the use of psionic abilities, having witnessed their potential from the voyages through Wildspace. Many giff are not religious, being dismissive of intense faiths. They see themselves as self-reliant and like it that way, rather than rely on the graces of deities. It is believed that their spacefaring has exposed them just how vast the universe is, and so they are wary to think highly of any specific faith. Additionally, while giff are not super destructive naturally, they will do whatever it takes to survive and get the job done. This can sometimes result in disasters like choosing to napalm bomb a forest to ash to smoke out an enemy. When challenged, there is no backing down for giff, and a true fight is to the death if there is enough animus.

Giff Communities

Having no more real place they refer to as home, the giff are essentially a race of drifters. They wander about the seas of space as mercenaries for hire, converging at hubs for spelljammers so that they can hitch a ride in exchange for labor. As a result, giff are very scattered across Wilspace. However, they are also distinct and recognize their racial bonds. They are a community without a physical boundary. Giff are not terribly familial with one another, but they enjoy being among their own caliber rather than with a bunch of fragile humans. Other people mostly see giff as just mercenaries with nothing else going for them in the grand scheme of things. Giff are known to be drawn to other worlds that are similar to their dreamy homeworld. Thus, they tend to like places with firearm capabilities. Some giff may settle in these locations. A lot of giff will adventure until they die untimely deaths. Their lifestyles of danger often ensure they never need to worry about growing old and weak.

Giff Adventurers

Giff are a nomadic race practically by birth due to their lack of a racial homeland. Giff are often raised on the move, whether in a mercenary family or on a ship owned by another party.

Artificer: Artifice is perhaps the only arcane thing giff will ever consider. The concept of adding bigger booms to your guns gets them a bit excited. However, few giff can actually become artificers. They are known to focus solely on artillery and have to be extremely rigorous in training to properly handle the magic items expected of artificers. Giff would really like if there were a nonmagical artificer that just lets them tinker and engineer.

Fighter: Fighting is something that comes second nature to giff. They are known for loving playful brawls that are often without weapons. When it comes to weapons, they are deadly due to giff etiquette. As such, giff fighters will learn as many weapons to use as they can. They tend to particularly favor ranged weapons like firearms or just projectiles. However, they are in no way precluded from using to-the-point melee weapons on some fool that dares to stand in their way.

Berserker: Normally, barbarians draw their rage from the primal energies of the environment around them. Berserkers are a type like that, but they are also based in martial instinct, like fighters. Berserker giff are very strange and rare, mainly because they can channel an inner fury that knows now bounds. This can sometimes make them unseemly to even other giff, as they behave like an utter beast. Berserker giff are almost always outliers and do not participate as commonly as mercenaries. They are far more likely to be hermits in some world where they live a very ascetic life.

Three sample giff adventurers are described below.

Saverlog is a savvy giff artificer well known for staring off into space, dreaming of his next project in tinkering with machinery. Means of travel has usually been the only instance when giff can tolerate the use of magic. Given the rarity of magic usage among giff, Saverlog often finds himself a bit of an outsider among his own kind. Seeking some guidance rather than suspicion, he finds a motely crew of other arcane users that he can call friends and mentors as they travel the known, and unknown, world.

Yivan is an embattled giff fighter who makes his living alongside his allies as mercenaries. Having survived many a sticky situation, Yivan is always prepared to fight alone should his fellows fall. He has all but abandoned idyllic thoughts of a life free from this mortal cycle of violence and now throws himself wholly into studying the ways of war and how to kill. There is no peace for Yivan, only a brief interstitial until the next battle.

Mojak is a giff berserker barbarian that was separated from her original crew in an excursion and left for dead within a forest of hostile wildlife. When she had resigned himself to death at the claws of a formidable beast, she was rescued by a druidic warrior of the forest, who enlightened her as to the forest and its temperaments. To her eventual dismay, Mojak learned that the forest had been contaminated by the wake of destruction left by the very excursion that had stranded her here. The forest and its inhabitants were thus lashing out as a result. Mojak wished to make amends and repay the druid that saved her, and so took on the mantle of a berserker, learning how to harness the anger of nature around her and use it in battle to protect it.

Roleplaying a Giff

When creating a giff adventurer, here are a few points to consider.

Tactical. Giff have minds oriented for battle and strategy. This can come off as stubborn to those who cannot convince them otherwise. Giff like to make a plan and stick to it. To convince them otherwise requires good tactical argument. Even then, giff are inclined to counter and can be a bit strongheaded about their own solutions.

Oblivious. While their physical traits are remarkable, giff are fairly inadequate in many social aspects. As previously mentioned, they are not very understanding of the weaknesses of other races in the flesh. As a result, they may be far too rough with more delicate races. In addition to this, social norms are sometimes lost on them, particularly those that may be more subtle. A giff may not know what fork to start with at a fancy meal, nor may they know when it is not an appropriate time to laugh.

Pragmatic. Not having access to fantastical magic, giff are very practical with resources and mindsets. They focus on the bare goals of whatever mission they have and their tools to achieve it. This also includes, unfortunately, oversight of diplomacy often. For giff, it's better to shoot first and then ask questions later.

Giff Characteristics: Stubborn, tactical, strategic, oblivious, dense, pragmatic, practical, trigger-happy

Giff Male Names: Angrel, Chamour, Hirschel, Pontulus, Herman

Giff Female Names: Herci, Gorma, Tomoa, Tamus, Hodjson

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