Flumph (3.5e Race)

Flumph
Summary::The good-natured flying pancakes may seem like a joke, but even these oddball aberrations can become a hero. Sometimes.  Flumphs, called the oiv’hass in their tongue, hail from distant gas giants where it is rumored they grow to great size within the thicker atmospheres.

Personality
Flumps are good-natured aliens from another world who travel the stars, going to untainted worlds and acting as guardians against the eldritch nightmares which they know exist deep within the many folds of space. The problem is, they're somehow both hideously terrifying and comically proportioned all at once. The flumphs desire nothing but to help but being self aware of their own appearance leads them to be shy and subtle. They are by and large pacifists, but it is tempered by a chivalrous streak. If faced with a situation failing because the flumph did not help, the flumph will break their role of non-intervention and step in with all the bravery and gusto it can manage. These shy unlikely heroes really want to help, if only they weren't so weird.

Flumphs are used to seeing omens within everything, from the position of birds in the sky to the weather patterns. Though it may seem like superstition, much of this is based in their genetic memory of fighting various elder evils and their signs of their approach. It is a survival technique if anything, and also the reason many find flumphs in the midst of slumber, busy interpreting their dreams as prophetic visions of the future.

Physical Description
Flumphs can best be defined as 3 ft diameter flattened jellyfish with a ring of tentacle arms and a bed of hollow cartilage spines on their undersides. A pair of horizonally slitted goat-like eyes stare upward from their flat body and the edges are ringed with countless puffing air holes which give them the name of "flumph". A mouth, hidden on one side admits the tentacles and spikes, is easily overlooked. Their bodies are soft and rubbery, composed of alien materials, water, and salt.

Flumphs have a strange diet heavy on alkaline materials and salt, a brew which helps determine the nature of the acid they secrete and the noxious fumes they can produce. They eat for nutrition purposes and not so much for taste, and lack a sense of smell as well. They often use their acid to eat through rock to access underground salts, but sometimes eat plants and small animals as well taking joy from the pursuit. Digestion occurs partly outside the stomach, melting the target into sludge which is eaten and partly absorbed by the spikes and tentacles.

Flumph reproduction is a strange event which is usually done on their gas giant homes, and involves the release of spores that build up mass. It is more akin to pollination of a plant then anything animal. These spores either sink into the thicker or watery layers of the planet, or they use a undisclosed ritual involving several flumphs which rocket one after another to throw the last flumph bearing the eggs into space, where they are thrown at supernatural velocities to seed other planets and star systems. When a seed finds a liquid environment it hatches and dozens of young flumphs escape. They appear as an unusual combination of cuttlefish and grub, until they grow large enough to leave their liquid homes and fly away.

Flumph eat and breathe, but do not sleep. They CAN sleep, however, and often do as they find the experience both pleasurable and prophetic.

Relations
The flumph have a hard life. They wish nothing more than to protect others from the terrible secrets of space, but realize their own appearance turns most against them and brands them as the very eldritch horrors they seek to prevent. Thus, most take a backseat approach, working in the shadows or by proxy. This combined with their apparently fragile bodies leads them to seem cowardly, but it is pacifism, shyness, and restraint rather than any fear which brings them to this behavior.

Sometimes flumphs manage to establish connections with others. For them, they form strong bonds and always upload the oaths they take with others with pride.

Alignment
Flumphs are usually lawful good, and often at least some kind of good. Non-good flumphs are sometimes the result of infection from pathogens alien to them, which corrupts their minds.

Lands
Because flumphs require salt in their diet, many take up homes in shoreline cliffs where the sea spray sustains and simultaneously obscures their dwelling.

Religion
Flumphs do not have any particular religious leanings, but sometimes worship gods of law and good. You could suppose their one religion is an anti-religion against the cults of eldritch horrors beyond time and space.

Language
Flumph speak Common and either Aklo (for Pathfinder) or Aboleth, as they have the correct number of vents to speak the alien tongue.

Names
Flumph names are typically nicknames, for their original names are as alien and incomprehensible as any elder evil summoning ritual.