Shab V1.6

Scattered across the farthest reaches of the world and dotting the lowest plains and highest mountains, the shabu maintain a caring and vigilant gaze upon the realms. These bestial beings, with their fierce appearance and fiercer beliefs, stand against any encroaching evils with righteous fury. Rooted in holy origins, they perform their protective duties with a pertinent eye for tradition. Each shab devotes themselves to their sacred charges, ensuring their place as watchdogs of the horizon.

Veneer of Beast and Stone

Quick to act but slow to change, shabu generally live as caretakers and sentries around sacred sites or important landmarks. Coated in a fine hair, the strange shabu vex other races with their intense complexions. An amalgamation of bestial traits, these odd blended features come together into a thick, tailless, bipedal humanoid standing around 6 feet tall with acute irises and pronounced fangs. Their sturdiness, unflinching gaze, and stone-like appearance earn shabu a constant comparison to statues.

Shabu sport a variety of bright colors for their hirsute skin, mimicking precious materials of ebony, ivory, jade, gold, or marble. Most shabu grow a curly mane on their heads with males developing more voluptuous hair. Some communities of shabu place restrictions on how the mane might be kept, combed, set, or even grown.

Eyes on the Horizon

Living nearly two centuries, shabu spend the majority of their lives in several pursuits, all the while never shirking their ultimate writ from the divine.

Long ago when the planes still balked against order, realms like the shadowfell and the underworld drew close to the land, casting the world in such oppressive gloom and decay that even the gods found hardship in containing it. The first fledgling civilizations lamented and dreaded the perpetual hordes of walking spirits and evil monstrosities bringing doom upon the land. Needing eyes among the mortal races, the gods created the first shabu from the purest of stones to impede any malaise from these deadly realms. As the first ages ended, the tumultuous planar rifts settled, and as the gods grew distant, the shabu found themselves with a single grand purpose: safeguard what was hard won.

Generations since, each shab swears to uphold those ancient oaths with the resolve of a guardian, attending to where darkness brews and striking it down. Each shabumdol claims specific locations to preserve, live in, and teach from. However, a lone shab feels no disservice to a safe shabudmol if they journey out from their home for a selfless or altruistic reason, such as training to better themselves and others, adventuring to destroy desecrated grounds and evil entities, or proselytizing the gods' ever-present qualities.

The shabu, though dry-witted and often detached from more mundane affairs, never spur a helping hand or curious question (though the brevity of their answers usually imply otherwise). Obligated to ward their homes for most of their lives, shabu who quest gain a fresh perspective of the world; these adventurering shabu are indispensable in keeping shabumdols from falling to apathy and complacency. Though they hardly laugh, a shab smiles deeper than their outward smirk with each successful travelling pursuit.

Duty's Compulsion

Among their own groups, shabu refer to the collective whole of individuals, leaders, traditions, rules, and laws as a shabumdol. Although all shabumdols point to a divine origin, centuries of local fixations and heroes have made each shabumdol distinct and independent from one another. Despite these possible tension points, each shab is honorbound to assist other shab of different shabumdol in times of dire need, and it is common for two or more shabumdols to unite their forces around a single threat or cause.

Tailoring themselves to outsiders in spite of their solemnity, shabu proselytize and caution other humanoids with speeches and constant diligence; after all, the terrors that once roamed freely lurk just out of sight and can return with little warning. Even though the gods' tangible splendor left the mortal realms long ago, shabu publicly recall through ceremony, duty, and story how the divine chiseled them in mimicry from the most imposing beasts known, granted them life, and gave them purpose to protect all living things. Amid their temples, outposts, and shrines, they perform constant, ritualized displays to the gods.