Guardian of Light (5e Race)
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Guardian of Light[edit]
There will be a ton of loot!-Cayde-6 describing the primary motivation for most guardians of light.
Physical Description[edit]
Beyond a generally medium-sized, humanoid body shape, a guardian’s appearance is dictated mostly by their subrace.
History[edit]
In a distant crystal sphere, a war between light and dark has raged for eons untold. While the darkness takes many forms with many faces, the light, embodied in great eldritch-white ball known simply as The Traveler raises up dead mortals to fight its battles. True to its descriptor, it has travelled its portion of Wildspace to many civilizations, raising them up to new heights of technology and purpose. Yet despite these gifts, The Traveler was never able to throw off the pursuing dark fleet behind it, leading many of its client civilizations to collapse. The last one was a human-inhabited world called Earth and while its golden age under The Traveler did end, from its ashes the light found new champions. These guardians, with their Traveler-bestowed companions called ghosts of light, became an immortal army capable of confronting, and eventually even wielding, the darkness.
Each guardian comes from one of three subraces; Humans, the original builder of their golden age, EXOs, human souls inhabiting mechanical constructs, and the Awoken, humans mutated by the darkness over eons. Details on each are described in the subrace sections. Regardless of origin, When raised from death a guardian loses all experiential memories of who they were, yet in their place they are filled with a renewed drive to train in combat, collect weaponry, and do stupid stunts that often get themselves killed.
Society[edit]
Guardians, by their easily distractable nature, aren’t very good at mundane activities. Most live among each other and other survivors of their former civilization’s collapse as freelance soldiers, rangers, and arcanists. Some do rise to organized ranks from which they can command enough respect to corral other guardians toward constructive or at least strategic goals, but these are rare exceptions. Away from their original home crystal sphere, guardians are good at working with most good-aligned people as long they don’t try to impose too many rules on them or take away their loot. If things get too boring, a guardian is more likely than not just going to leave without saying a word for their next adventure. Some have compared them to extremely homicidal itinerants.
Guardian of Light Names[edit]
Guardian names depend on their subrace. Awoken names usually have strange sounds or consonants, EXOs use a name then a number to designate which version of themselves they are, and Humans use a variety of names from their many old cultures before the collapse.
Awoken: Eqooch, Izac, Maaro, Quuvgech, Zan, Zesh
EXO: Blight-10, Flow-6, Hook-7, Savage-21, Steel-9, Vamp-17
Human: Cerys, Kayla, Kai, Owen, Robert, Tegan
Guardian of Light Traits[edit]
Light and gun-wielding transhumans from a fallen system intent on seizing their destiny.
Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity score increases by 2.
Age. Guardians of light are immortal.
Alignment. Guardians of light tends towards the chaotic good alignment, but many also end up neutral good or chaotic neutral.
Size. Your size is Medium.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
Champion of The Traveler. You benefit from magic that preserves life but that normally doesn’t affect undead or constructs such cure wounds, mass healing word, or similar spells and magical effects. You also have advantage on saving throws against being turned.
Firearms Adept. You have proficiency with all firearms, ignore the loading property of any firearm, and can use any firearm as a spellcasting focus. Additionally, as an action you can change the damage dealt by any firearm you wield to cold, fire, lightning, necrotic, psychic, radiant, or the weapon’s normal damage type for 24 hours or until you use this trait again.
Space Ghost. Space Ghost As an action, you can summon or dismiss a special familiar called a ghost of light. The ghost of light behaves similar to a familiar summoned by the find familiar spell, but it cannot be permanently dismissed. See the Ghost of Light creature entry for more details.
Stunt Driver. You have proficiency with land vehicles.
Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common.
Subrace. Your guardian of light was raised from an Awoken, EXO, or Human corpse. Choose 1 when you select this race.
Awoken[edit]
When the darkness and light clashed during the collapse of their world’s technological peak, a group of humans sought to escape the chaos aboard a great spelljammer and flee to the stars. They didn’t get far until they were caught in the conflict and got trapped in a pocket dimension where time flowed more slowly than it did on the material plane. There they and their descendants spent millennia developing their own culture and abilities while mere centuries passed outside. The darkness was able to infect them, but slowly enough thanks to the time dilation that their bodies adapted to it with most of the changes being cosmetic. Eventually, some Awoken, as they now called themselves, were able to leave the Dreaming City, what they called their home demiplane. Some rejoined the remnants of humanity and the EXOs in resettling their crystal sphere and some formed their own kingdom amid the ruins of the fall.
Awoken guardians appear as humans with light purple, blue, green, or grey skin, similarly hued eyes that faintly glow in the darkness, and hair of a vast array of colors. Many Awoken tend to display more muted emotions than base humans.
Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 1.
Starborn. Your creature type is aberration in addition to being undead.
Darkvision. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.
EXO[edit]
In the last days of their humanity’s golden age under The Traveler, a great artificer sought immortality and, with the help of the encroaching darkness, succeeded. He found a way to transfer the human soul into an ageless machine form, though in the process of perfecting the process many of these early EXOs were not converted willingly. There was also a flaw in that most human consciousnesses couldn’t reconcile their new bodies. To prevent complete degradation, most EXO’s have to periodically wipe their memories every few decades, though guardian EXOs have proven to be far more resilient. Thus, while there are many EXOs that are chronologically centuries old, few remember that far back. Many EXOs still eat, drink and sleep to psychologically connect themselves in their bodies rather than for biological needs.
EXOs’ mechanical forms are all humanoid to stall defragmentation. Each one is unique in the design of its plates and exact dimensions while coming in every color under the sun in a million different patterns and designs. Many EXOs customize their chassis with decorations like horns, vents, extra armoring, and various widgets. EXO heads tend to look like a cross between a skull and a helmet with glowing electronic eyes set into them.
Ability Score Increase. Your Intelligence score increases by 1.
Cybermind. Your creature type is construct in addition to being undead.
Needless. You don’t need to breathe, eat, drink or sleep, though you are capable of the last three. Magic can't put you to sleep.
Sentry's Rest. When you take a long rest, you must spend at least six hours in an inactive, motionless state, rather than sleeping. In this state, you appear inert, but it doesn’t render you unconscious, and you can see and hear as normal.
Human[edit]
Outside of one colony on the edge of their crystal sphere, all the human settlements of their system were driven to ruin in their great collapse. Only their home planet was able sustain even the remnants of a society. With the help of the EXOs and later the awoken, these fallen people were able to rebuild enough to prove themselves worthy of The Traveler’s light once more. Now their dead rise to continue the fight and rebuilding.
Human guardians look identical to normal humans. There is no way to tell they are undead without spells like detect evil and good.
Ability Score Increase. Your Strength score increases by 1.
Remnant. Your creature type is humanoid in addition to being undead.
Old World Armory. You have proficiency with Glaives, Greatswords, Halberds, and Longbows. You may use Firearms Adept to change the damage type of these weapons the same way you can with firearms.
Random Height and Weight[edit]
| Base Height |
Height Modifier* |
Base Weight |
Weight Modifier** |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5′ 6'' | +1d12 | 150* lb. | × (1d6*) lb. |
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*Height = base height + height modifier | |||
- Change the base weight and weight modifier to 250 and 2d6 for EXOs.
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