Kashaskan

Bulky, four-armed, strong, and bearing scales that can help protect from injury; Skans are often intimidating creatures, made worse by a driving desire for food and a weak sense of empathy.

Physical Characteristics

Intimidating to most creatures, Kashaskans are four-armed bipeds covered with a thick hide of dermal scales over a dense musculature. They possess features often attributed to lizards and dragons, with thick muzzled maws and sharp teeth. Individual Kashaskan features often involve various colorations in scales and patterns, additional dermal deposits, frills, horns, or blunt claws.

Notably, Kashaskans lack any typical humanoid marks of sexual dimorphism; females and males have similar builds, and due to reptilian sex, can even be difficult to identify when nude. Traits do exist, however, and can be learned through observation — such as scale patterns and proportions, positioning of dermal deposits, bones, and horns, in addition to variations in vocal tones. Kashaskans breed as reptiles do, with clutches of eggs, and have very high breeding rates with low expectancy of survival to adulthood.

Mental Characteristics

Kashaskans suffer from an almost insatiable desire for food, and a weakened sense of empathetic response to other creatures; while this does not make all Kashaskans heartless, it does dramatically heighten the prevalence of callous, destructive, or violent behavior in their species. A Kashaskan’s sense of hunger never truly subsides and often drives behavior; it is at least manageable if the Kashaskan meets its energy needs — roughly twice that of a human.

Magical Characteristics

While Kashaskans have a reasonable proportion of manablooded individuals, at roughly 1:500, very few reach maturity, as the manifestation of manablooded Kashaskans is both obvious and dangerous. During maturation, manablooded Kashaskans suffer severe mutation of their secondary pair of arms as they form into large, draconian wings over a period of a week. Throughout this experience, the Kashaskan’s hunger is increased by magnitudes, as their body attempts to replenish energy from such drastic changes — such hunger and pain often result in bouts of destructive rage, violence, or occasionally the Kashaskan's own death.