Good Evening, and welcome back. Parrish here; I took a month off to do take care of some other

Good Evening, and welcome back. 
Parrish here; I took a month off to do take care of some other projects, but the last few weeks I’ve been busy behind the scenes for AoE. We have a new concept artist to help create the player character races of Alterra. 
Capi is from Saint-Denis, Réunion, off the coast of Madagascar. Capi specializes in concept art, and their style is a great match for Alterra.  We’re not finished by a long shot, but I’ll be dropping our races here and talking about them one at a time. 
Tanooki- Diminutive Raccoon-like race that can turn into stone at will. Wiley, mischievous, and sneaky, tanooki are perfect for players who like getting into trouble and always having tricks up their sleeves to get back out of it.  Their homeland in Alterra is a densely forested island, where they build treetop villages.
Tanuki are a real animal, native to east Asia, actually more closely related to dogs than to raccoons. Japanese myths say they have magical powers, and bring good luck, especially to shops and restaurants. 
In Alterra, lazy/hungry tanooki will often wait outside restaurants in statue form until the restaurant closes and throws leftovers out. Observant diners realized that tanooki wait outside the restaurants that serve the tastiest food, so they patronized restaurants with tanooki waiting outside. Noticing this trend, shrewd restaurant owners began setting out hungry looking tanooki statues to fool diners. This only benefited the tanooki, because now if they’re ever in trouble, they can transform into stone, and passersby will just figure the nearest restaurant got a new statue.
Btw- the two tanooki pictured are a brother-sister pair named Ruff and Tumble, created and played by @snickups 

If you want to check out MORE of Capi’s work:
capi974.artstation.com
https://www.deviantart.com/capi974/gallery/
https://www.facebook.com/capi974/