Kuwaffri
Replaces Ogrun as the Ninth Race. Visual inspiration: Davy Jones filtered through a cephalopod head shape, not Illithid lore or Twi'lek culture — the resemblance is skin-deep on purpose.
Homeland: A drowned rift, not a far-off island — see Geography document. Distance was never the barrier; depth is. Nobody has found the Kuwaffri because nobody has ever dived far enough straight down, not because they're far away. Their air-filled home cavern sits at the bottom of the trench, reached only by a long, lightless, genuinely lethal swim through open water.
Placement — the Red Sea, recommended: Of the three waters floated (Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea), the Red Sea is the strongest fit and the working choice. It sits right between Dar Ilm al-Zakir and the dinosaur continent (Giants' Morocco/Israel corner, Confederacy's Egyptian coast) — close to civilization without belonging to any nation's home waters, which keeps "nobody's found them" plausible without requiring true open-ocean isolation. It's also the real-world example of an actual tectonic rift valley slowly tearing open, which gives the setting an honest geological reason for a trench to exist there rather than an ordinary continental-shelf seabed. The Persian Gulf, by contrast, is realistically shallow — a poor match for "you have to swim down, not out" — and the Arabian Sea remains a perfectly good deep-ocean fallback if the Red Sea ever needs to serve some other purpose. See Geography and Dar Ilm al-Zakir documents.
Untouched by the Long War. Alone among Tir Hathar's peoples, the Kuwaffri's home was never part of the war, never scarred by it, never touched by the death of the god of Teachers and Sages or anything else that shaped the rest of the world's cosmology. Where the Elves are unique for remembering what was lost, the Kuwaffri are unique for having nothing to have lost in the first place — a different flavor of "outside the story everyone else is living in," not a repeat of the Elves' claim.
Body¶
Height: Short — roughly 5' on average, noticeably shorter than most of the continent's peoples. Partly what keeps them from reading as a re-skin of anything else in the world.
Head: Smooth, faintly elongated, cephalopod in shape — large dark eyes, no external ears, two or three short facial palps around the mouth used for fine manipulation and for tasting the water the way a real cephalopod does. In place of hair, long tentacles trail from the scalp — not decorative. They read water pressure and current with real precision (how a Kuwaffri navigates a lightless trench without needing eyes to do all the work), they serve as a private, wordless body-language between two of their own kind, and yes — they help with swimming too, providing real propulsion and steering alongside webbed hands and feet, the same basic principle as an eel or cuttlefish using body and limb undulation to move.
Respiration: Genuinely amphibious — gills for the descent and the flooded approach tunnels, lungs for the air-pocket home itself and for life on the surface. Not a hand-wave; both systems are real and both get used.
Eyes and light: Built for total darkness, not for the sun. Kuwaffri don't see especially well even at home — the tentacles do most of the real navigating — and bright surface light is actively unpleasant. Goggles, dark lenses, or simple cloth wrapped over the eyes are a common, unremarkable sight on any Kuwaffri spending real time above water. Out of water, the tentacles lose some precision but keep working: a Kuwaffri can still read air currents and pressure on dry land, just less exactly than they'd read water. In practice this means Kuwaffri read weather exceptionally well — a skill that travels with them anywhere they go, magic or not.
Coloring: Left to the player — no fixed palette — but leaning toward cool tones (blues, violets, deep greens) rather than warm ones as the general tendency.
Bioluminescence — the whole culture starts here: Kuwaffri skin flares involuntarily under strong emotion, including the specific strain of telling a lie. This isn't a magic trick, it's biology, and it's the actual root of everything below: among their own kind, real deception is nearly impossible, because you can't hide what your own skin is telling the room. A society where lying to your own people is physically difficult grows a very particular relationship with the spoken word — and a very particular, disorienting reaction to surface peoples, who lie constantly and carry no tell at all.
The Code¶
Not borrowed wholesale from any one real-world tradition — built out of what the body and the homeland actually demand, the same way the bioluminescence built the honesty culture. Three tenets, not seven:
Stillness — words are cheap where sound carries badly and light draws unwanted attention; restraint and presence say more than talking does.
The Glow — never speak against what your own skin shows. The closest thing the Kuwaffri have to a sacred principle, because breaking it while still visibly glowing honest is nearly a physical impossibility.
The Depth — endurance over panic, forged by a homeland that punishes fleeing harder than it punishes holding still.
If it's useful shorthand later: the tenets read closer to bushido filtered through an alien, non-human lens than to any specific real-world culture — closer kin to how a setting like Legend of the Five Rings builds Rokugan than to a direct transplant of real history. Worth keeping that distance on purpose.
Origin Focus — Kuwaffri¶
Taken like any other Origin Focus, with a normal Focus pick. No bonus skill. Their height is under average, not small, and carries no mechanical effect.
Level 1: - Amphibious. You breathe water as easily as air and swim as fast as you walk. - Current-Sense. Your scalp tentacles read pressure and movement. Underwater, you sense creatures and objects within 30 feet without needing sight; on land, within 10 feet. Darkness and blindness don't stop you finding your way or fighting what's next to you. You can read the weather a day ahead. - Light-Shy. In bright sunlight or its equal, roll sight-based checks and hit rolls twice and take the worse — unless your eyes are covered by goggles, dark lenses, or cloth. - The Glow. Your skin flares when you lie or feel strong emotion. Another Kuwaffri always knows when you lie. Anyone else who can see your bare skin makes you roll Convince checks to deceive them twice, taking the worse. Darkness or full coverage hides it.
Level 2 — The Surface Tell: Surface peoples don't glow, but they do tense. Within your Current-Sense range you feel the pressure of other bodies — held breath, a racing heart, muscles locking. - Roll twice and take the better on Notice checks to read the intentions of, or catch a lie from, someone in range. - Once per scene, ask the GM whether a creature in range is under strain right now. The GM answers truthfully, yes or no, never why.
It reads strain, not truth: a calm, practiced liar reads clean, and a frightened honest witness doesn't. That limit is deliberate — the same reason Sila Nasrin don't get "know when you're being lied to." Meant to sit slightly above an average Level 2, since The Glow is a real cost.
The Ancestry Sigil — Unknown to the Sigil Houses¶
The Kuwaffri do carry a Sigil. Nobody outside their homeland has ever verified it, because Sigil-bearers among them essentially never leave — by custom, or by something closer to being kept home. It isn't a fourteenth recognized house, it isn't Aberrant, and it isn't a Cruel Sigil; it simply isn't catalogued anywhere, because the Sigil Houses have never had a live specimen to study.
Race: Kuwaffri Domain: Inherited memory and lineage — direct, involuntary access to what a bloodline itself knew, not communion with the dead and not necromancy. Distinct from both the Bone Sigil's raised-dead servants and the Chain Cult's "ancestors can be reached" theology, though a curious mind could draw a line between all three.
Taken as a Sigil Focus like any other (see Sigil Houses document): a normal Focus pick, no other Sigil, and Level 2 requires character level 5.
Level 1: - Bloodline Recall. Recall any language or fact a direct ancestor personally knew, as though you'd learned it firsthand. You're never untrained: roll any skill check as if you had the skill at level-0, provided an ancestor plausibly knew it. It arrives as bare knowledge, without the ancestor's own judgment or context attached. - Ancestor's Voice. Once per day, speak with the remembered impression of a specific named ancestor for a short conversation. Not a spirit, not a haunting — the most complete and honest memory-record a bloodline can produce, flaws included.
Level 2 — The Whole Line: Once per week, as an Instant action in a moment of crisis, a whole lineage reacts through you at once: automatically succeed on one save, or turn one failed skill check into a success. No active recall required.
Notes: A Kuwaffri PC who bears this Sigil is already a walking exception to how their people actually work — worth being deliberate about, not a default.
Naming¶
Kuwaffri — the people's own name for themselves, not an outsider's label. Individual names follow the same invented phonetic logic rather than borrowing any real human language, with a consistent mouth-shape rule worth keeping for flavor: their palped, beaked mouths don't form a clean labiodental "V" — it comes out closer to a "W." "TH" comes out closer to an "F." (Open: whether to extend this rule to other sounds — plosives like "P"/"B" and nasals like "M" are worth a look if the phonetic bit is fun to keep building.)
Open: exact size of the trench and the home cavern within the Red Sea; whether the outside world has any awareness the Kuwaffri exist at all, or whether that's a total unknown even as rumor; full Ancestry Sigil balance pass, same as every other first-draft Sigil in this setting; how a Sigil-bearing Kuwaffri is actually kept home — custom, or something with more teeth.