Gnarefuroid

• Be wary of strangers until you share a meal with them.
• Value unusual smells, flavors, and textures as precious treasures.
• Collect discarded items that might be useful later.

• Assume you grew up in a dump or stuck to a space station.
• Only appreciate your culture and habits from a distance.
• Get squeamish about your preferred foods or living spaces.

Gnarefuroids have bulbous, cartilaginous bodies resembling mushroom caps that sit atop a muscular snaillike appendage used for locomotion. Their outer skin constantly secretes a sticky resin that prevents infection and decompression in a vacuum, begins predigestion of food, and assists with adhering to surfaces. Pores in their body allow access for their cirrisensors: prehensile tentacles fitted with specialized organs for seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, and speaking as well as reading chemical or electrical impulses for more sensitive specimens. Each gnarefuroid has two longer feather-like tendrils with numerous dexterous digits that function as arms and hands. Gnarefuroids' bodies are soft and sensitive to touch, so they frequently attach objects from their environment to themselves as protection the way certain crustaceans don shells. Most gnarefuroids spawn in material-rich locations like junkyards, so their shells are often composed of mismatched slabs of scrap cobbled together into a haphazard mass of metal and plastic. Gnarefuroids from other environments might build shells from wood, bone, rock, or any other substances they can find. Their resin coating allows them to plaster themselves in lighter debris such as sand, glass, or mulch, filling the cracks between their shells' disparate pieces.

Each gnarefuroid is an autonomous polyp from a much larger organism called a gigafuroid, or “home mother” in their language. Gigafuroids are apex forms of scavenging life, constructing elaborate armor from discarded machinery and slithering across their domains like landslides. Being solitary creatures, gigafuroids produce gnarefuroids to propagate their species across vast distances. The gigafuroid spawns gnarefuroids by budding their own organic and cognitive matter, sending their progeny to experience new tastes and sensations inaccessible to their gargantuan form. When multiple gnarefuroids from different origins meet, they can merge into a new gigafuroid to renew their life cycle.

Gnarefuroids' stomachs can derive sustenance from almost anything, an adaptation from generations of living in landfills. The longer gnarefuroids live in cleaner environments, however, the more their ability to feed on refuse deteriorates. Despite their omnivorous diets, gnarefuroids are highly sensitive to taste, cultivating intensely specific palates of preferred flavors and fragrances.

Gnarefuroids claim they can trace their ancestry back to aberrant species that inhabited sewers on Lost Golarion. Their prevalence in the trash processing units on Absalom Station combined with their instinctive ability to navigate technological infrastructure suggests a longstanding familiarity with urban survival that makes their story plausible. Unlike other species linked to the vanished planet, gnarefuroids harbor little interest in their forgotten past, placing far greater emphasis on the present. After all, interstellar travel allowed them to connect and reproduce with extraterrestrial gnarefuroids that evolved parallel to the ones native to Absalom Station, making the current age an era of discovery and expansion for their kind. Many gnarefuroids lean toward insularity, preferring to keep their own company. Gnarefuroid siblings share curiosities and exchange delicacies in their tight-knit family groups, where the gigafuroid acts as one part parent, one part information hub, and one part community center. The aberrations avoid outsiders unless approached with offers of new flavors or encouraged by their kin to explore.

Gnarefuroids' reticence stems from generations of suffering other intelligent creatures' distaste for their appearance, tastes, and habitats. They were shunned as garbage-dwelling monsters since before the Gap, a sentiment retained by most laypeople. Ysoki were among the first to recognize gnarefuroids' complexity and open communications, earning them special status in gnarefuroid society. Goblins, with their a mainstream cultural appreciation for junk, are also quick to accept gnarefuroids among their communities in Botscrap. Gnarefuroids usually get along with astrazoans and other aberrations, who are more likely to appreciate their odd perspectives and aesthetics. Although many cultures still view gnarefuroids' habits with disgust, individual gnarefuroids who prove useful, benevolent, or hygienic can earn acceptance among other species. Taste drives most of gnarefuroid culture. Gnarefuroids rate novel and nuanced flavors as life's highest delicacies, devotedly seeking out flavors to share with their closest companions. Their language has more words for flavors and scents than for colors and shapes. Even siblings spawned from the same gigafuroid have dramatically disparate individual preferences for flavors. Their unique tastes often extend into aesthetics and style, for they externalize their distinct preferences by building shells that serve as collages of their favorite colored, shaped, textured, and flavored scrap.

Gnarefuroids speak a language that shares numerous root words with Aklo but diverges in many ways from any other living language. The quickly evolving language lacks set pronunciation, meaning everything from the name of their species to individual names are open to interpretation. Their sensory acuity also informs gnarefuroids' naming conventions. Each gnarefuroid spends their first few months of life discovering their preferred tastes, sounds, and textures of words so they can assemble their name. Such names blend syllables from favorite flavors and brands of favorite scrap products with syllables a gnarefuroid finds pleasant to hear or say, sometimes including musical inflections or sounds only replicable by cirrisensors. Their reproductive cycle makes gendering irrelevant, so each gnarefuroid simply chooses the pronouns they find most aesthetically stimulating. Many enjoy “silent” letters that subtly change pronunciation.

Gnarefuroids tend to focus on what's right in front of them, forgetting the past and planning their futures as far as they need to safely enjoy the present. They strive to lead lives of comfort and stimulation through food, art, and craftsmanship. They default to sedentary lifestyles, but they might be spurred to adventuring by discomforting changes to their habitats, cravings for new flavors, responsibility to reproduce with distant colonies, or accrued boredom. While some specimens find actualization in a higher purpose, such as religion, ambition, or national identity, most prefer homeostasis.

Most gnarefuroids think of divine will as just another natural force, paying as much attention to deities as they do to the weather or to the orbit of their planet or satellite. Those who do find religion are often inspired by Hylax's community spirit, Zon-Shelyn's attention to sensation and expression, Oras's celebration of adapting and evolving, or Urgathoa's indulgent hedonism. Mystical gnarefuroids who discover natural environments that turn waste into resources sometimes follow the Green Faith, the Cycle, or other primordial traditions as they embrace more primal and abstract cycles of life.

Popular Edicts celebrate your unique interests, enjoy life's little pleasures, make the most of what comes your way, mind your own business, prioritize comfort and safety
Popular Anathema be exactly like everyone else, discard things that still have use, hoard treasures without using them, prioritize ambition over practical comfort, refuse new sensory experiences

Abardoeng, Dysktypowary, Fvinbinbonbum, Inphoivym, MyroOoal, Nzillif, Swaltyum, UafoHVORrtini.

8

Small

climb 15 feet

Constitution, Intelligence, Free

Charisma

Additional languages equal to your Intelligence modifier (if it's positive). Choose from the list of common languages and any other languages to which you have access (such as the languages prevalent on your home world).

You can see in dim light as though it were bright light, and you ignore the concealed condition due to dim light.

You can survive long periods clinging to inhospitable surfaces. You add a month to the time before you suffer any penalties from starvation or thirst.