Hardor

• Feel uncomfortable staying in one place for extended periods.
• Seek the freedom of bright, open spaces.
• Juggle a dozen projects at the same time.

• Struggle to understand your silent communication.
• Trust you to fix almost anything, living or mechanical.
• Consider you a great listener.

Hardors are bipedal plant creatures whose bodies are primarily made of gold-tinted, thick, liquid-retentive leaves that end in spiked ridges or long, sharp spines. They typically resemble dwarves in size and stature, standing under 5 feet tall on average with thick, stocky frames that weigh upwards of 200 pounds. Each hardor has a dense, woody core hidden within their torso, surrounded by an arrangement of leaves growing out from several stems that form their head, arms, and body. Whenever possible, hardors wear skirts or short pants, and eschew footwear, leaving their tough, root-like legs and feet exposed to the air. This enables them to more readily absorb ambient moisture and allows them to both send and receive chemical communication more easily.
Their dense skin provides protection from the heat, blowing sands, and the swarming, microscopic omnivores of Dorjo, and their ability to retain copious water stores within their bodies are perfectly adapted for life on a drought-ridden planet. Their head, which typically includes a single large, spined leaf hanging down over their neck and upper chest, hold their eyes and ears, but hardors do not have mouths, and their brains reside within their cores, safe inside their chests. They do not naturally use a spoken language, relying instead on a combination of telepathic communication and a complex language of chemical signals that other ancestries often find difficult to interpret.

The hardor home world, Dorjo, is largely covered by vast, windswept crystal deserts. To support a growing population, hardors depend upon several extremely deep, high-salinity seas that dot their planet's surface. The enterprising people have constructed massive pipelines that run across Dorjo's surface, pumping water from these seas into the huge hardor cities on a rigid schedule. Managing the natural water supply is such a challenging logistical problem that hardors have turned to their fellow Szandite Collective planets to develop greater and greater technological solutions. Hardor desalination rigs, marvels of engineering in their own right, run back and forth along the pipelines like automated trains, extracting thousands of tons of salt from millions of gallons of water on a weekly basis.
Young hardors reach physical maturity after only four years of childhood and quickly find niches for work within their widely industrialized society. The population is concentrated in their dense cities and around space ports, providing a wide variety of opportunities for careers and specialties. Interplanetary commerce evolves around exporting mineral salts harvested by their desalination rigs in huge quantities. In addition, there is a growing demand for hardor engineers and medics in Near Space, leading more and more of these industrious people to find positions off-world, in colonies, on space stations, or as part of starship crews.

Hardor belief systems are widely varied, but Lambatuin remains one of the most popular deities among their numbers. Millennia of nomadic life on Dorjo have forged a strong anti stagnation sentiment into these people, and the great strides their society has made thanks to the fellow members of the Collective are deeply appreciated at a cultural level. Groups of hardors work to constantly innovate, and to share the greatest and most advantageous of those innovations with the rest of the Collective, or whatever larger entity they join.

Popular Edicts remain unmoored like roots in sand, use and innovate technology to help others
Popular Anathema let machines fall into disrepair, exhaust a natural water supply

Hardor nicknames include Biggergreen, Hookbarb, Jumpoff, Noscars, Pinkroots, Quilleyes, Sandshorts, Scraper, Toolbox, Widewalker.

10

Medium

Constitution, Wisdom, 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 communicate mentally with creatures within 30 feet. You can communicate only with creatures that share a language with you. This doesn't give you any access to their thoughts, and it communicates no more information than normal speech would.

You gain nourishment in the same way that plants do, through a combination of photosynthesis, and absorbing minerals through your roots. You typically do not need to pay for food. If you go without sunlight for 1 week, you begin to starve. You can derive nourishment from specially formulated bottles of sunlight instead of natural sunlight, but these bottles cost 10 times as much as standard rations.