#tanooki
A venerable faun druid stands in the middle of a forest path. As you approach, he greets you, but warns, “The forest is not welcoming visitors today” and urges you to turn back.
…except he’s actually a Tanooki gourmand utilizing a minor illusion cantrip, because he’s found a bountiful patch of mushrooms, and is afraid you’ll ask to share them. He made his small curved mushroom knife look like a formidable sickle, and added the impressive antlers of a great faun, but forgot to hide his own bushy tail.
Hey Team- Parrish here. This time we’ll be doing something I hope you’ll see a lot more often for Alterra flavor: I post a picture from AoE or one of our partners, and tell you about how I’d include it in an expedition, David will give his own story, and we’d also love to hear your take on it.
So, I was coloring this standee by Matt Holmberg (@orwin-dm), when I noticed that this venerable faun druid had a very suspicious looking tail in the back of his robe. You can continue the story I started. Will the adventures turn back? What would he do if they call his bluff?
Or tell us your own story for this picture. What popped into your head when you saw them? What sort of powers do they have? Do they use them for good, or for awesome?
Okay- until next time…
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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/
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