Ord

• Move slowly and deliberately.
• Surprise your companions with beautiful, resonant songs.
• Wonder at the freedom of wide-open spaces.

• Try to protect you from physical obstacles in your path.
• Fear your intimidating stature.
• Ask you to eavesdrop on whispered conversations.

Ords are tall, bipedal humanoids with relatively small heads and torsos, extremely long limbs, and short, thick tails. Used to a lightless, underground existence, ords evolved without eyes and instead navigate the world around them using a network of eight earlike canals arranged in circles in raised, cartilaginous protrusions that sit atop their shoulders. Air and vibrations pass through these ultrasensitive tubes, giving ords a precise understanding of their surroundings and the movements of creatures around them. Standing upright, ords average 13 to 15 feet tall, but they normally walk with their legs bent at dramatic angles, leaving them closer to 7 feet tall for practical purposes. They tend to walk hunched forward with their heads held below their shoulders, occasionally relying on their long arms to maintain balance and ward off obstacles; their thick, muscular tails trail behind them for balance.
Ord skin is covered in fine, scalelike flakes that are shed and replaced every few months. Those who have had only limited exposure to sunlight tend to be extremely pale in color, their scales varying from pale yellows to grays and blues, often with subtly variegated patterns. Ords who journey outside the tunnels of their native Lazel find their scales grow more vibrant, and the contrast of their natural variegation increases dramatically. The anatomy of ord mouths is rather unique—these oversized orifices contain multiple opposable joints on the top and bottom, allowing ords to form multiple openings of different shapes and sizes. This strange quirk of anatomy is instrumental in ord singing, as a single ord can sound as if they have two or more voices at once.

Ord society is made of a loose network of small towns clustered around underground water sources and naturally occurring patches of edible fungus. Though they've long since developed industrialized agriculture, their hyperlocal, ancient towns have persisted. Given the limited space within the tunnels, vehicles are rare beneath Lazel's surface. Young ords often set off on walk tours through the tunnels, leaving their homes and meandering their way through the mazelike underground, often along waterways that have eroded their own tunnels, until they find a new place to call home. Ords have constructed large, shielded space ports in several places where their tunnels meet the planet's dangerous surface. Few visitors ever come to the strange, dark world—it's not exactly inviting to outsiders—but more and more ord youths find their wanderings leading them out into the stars, where a frighteningly nonlinear existence awaits them.
Because of the difficulty of travel from point to point within the tunnels, ord society has come to rely on the instantaneous communication the szandite crystals afford them. Thanks to the crystal network, news, innovations, and artistic creations have proliferated across the world much faster than ords themselves since long before Lazel had an infosphere. Even now, many ords prefer to communicate with the crystals rather than using datapads or other computers.

Ord society widely embraces the interconnection of music and darkness, making Zon-Shelyn one of the most popular deities among them. Others, especially those who have embraced life on the surface, have adopted Meyel's love of music for similar reasons. In more recent years, as the galaxy has opened to them, many ords have become enamored with the freedom of space travel and turned to Weydan and the Endless Horizon.

Popular Edicts find the harmonies that underpin the universe, the darkness is nothing to fear
Popular Anathema destroy a passage, hide behind silence

Arlafi, Fahlahn, Hoosh, Jothu, Owacha, Puuchen, Uthush, Vowolo, Wheesha, Zenole

8

Large

Dexterity, Charisma, Free

Intelligence

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).

Ords don't have eyes or equivalent physical organs. You are immune to sight-based effects and automatically fail sight-based Perception checks.

You perceive sound through a network of hypersensitive organs. Your hearing is a precise sense with a range of 60 feet, and an imprecise sense (as normal) beyond that distance.