Tabaxi

Hailing from a strange and distant land, wandering tabaxi are catlike humanoids driven by curiosity to collect interesting artifacts, gather tales and stories, and lay eyes on all the world’s wonders. Ultimate travelers, the inquisitive tabaxi rarely stay in one place for long. Their innate nature pushes them to leave no secrets uncovered, no treasures or legends lost.

Wandering Outcasts
Most tabaxi remain in their distant homeland, content to dwell in small, tight clans. These tabaxi hunt for food, craft goods, and largely keep to themselves.

However, not all tabaxi are satisfied with such a life. Those tabaxi gifted with curiosity are compelled to wander far and wide. They seek out stories, artifacts, and lore. Those who survive this period of wanderlust return home in their elder years to share news of the outside world. In this manner, the tabaxi remain isolated but never ignorant of the world beyond their home.

Barterers Of Lore
Tabaxi treasure knowledge rather than material things. A chest filled with gold coins might be useful to buy food or a coil of rope, but it’s not intrinsically interesting. In the tabaxi’s eyes, gathering wealth is like packing rations for a long trip. It’s important to survive in the world, but not worth fussing over.

Instead, tabaxi value knowledge and new experiences. Their ears perk up in a busy tavern, and they tease out stories with offers of food, drink, and coin. Tabaxi might walk away with empty purses, but they mull over the stories and rumors they collected like a miser counting coins.

Although material wealth holds little attraction for the tabaxi, they have an insatiable desire to find and inspect ancient relics, magical items, and other rare objects. Aside from the power such items might confer, a tabaxi takes great joy in unraveling the stories behind their creation and the history of their use.

Fleeting Fancies
Wandering tabaxi are mercurial creatures, trading one obsession or passion for the next as the whim strikes. A tabaxi’s desire burns bright, but once met it disappears to be replaced with a new obsession. Objects remain intriguing only as long as they still hold secrets.

A tabaxi rogue could happily spend months plotting to steal a strange gem from a noble, only to trade it for passage on a ship or a week’s lodging after stealing it. The tabaxi might take extensive notes or memorize every facet of the gem before passing it on, but the gem holds no more allure once its secrets and nature have been laid bare.

Tinkerers and Minstrels
Curiosity drives most of the tabaxi found outside their homeland, but not all of them become adventurers. Tabaxi who seek a safer path to satisfy their obsessions become wandering tinkers and minstrels.

These tabaxi work in small troupes, usually consisting of an elder, more experienced tabaxi who guides up to four young ones learning their way in the world. They travel in small, colorful wagons, moving from settlement to settlement. When they arrive, they set up a small stage in a public square where they sing, play instruments, tell stories, and offer exotic goods in trade for items that spark their interest. Tabaxi reluctantly accept gold, but they much prefer interesting objects or pieces of lore as payment.

These wanderers keep to civilized realms, preferring to bargain instead of pursuing more dangerous methods of sating their curiosity. However, they aren’t above a little discreet theft to get their claws on a particularly interesting item when an owner refuses to sell or trade it.

The Sun-Touched place
The Sun-Touched Place is the ancestral homeland of the tabaxi and the leonin, and is considered a paradise for the catfolk. Countless songs, poems and art pieces have been made surrounding the legendary place by those who have been lucky enough to set foot on it. However, that pool of people is incredibly small, as the exact location of the isles is a closely guarded secret by those who have been there, to the point where many people don't even believe it exists.

The catfolk of Wormwood, are rarely found in the common world primarily due to how few of them choose to leave the Sun-Touched Place. Tabaxi are the most likely to wander into the wider world due to their innate curiosity and wanderlust, and enough of them have chosen to stay that they have formed small and scattered clans. Due to this there are a substantial amount of second and third - generation tabaxi that have never set foot on the Sun-Touched Place. Some of these tabaxi dedicate their lives to discovering the true location of their homeland, while others are content to visit the place only in their dreams.

Tabaxi Personality
A tabaxi might have motivations and quirks much different from a dwarf or an elf with a similar background. You can use the following tables to customize your character in addition to the trait, ideal, bond, and flaw from your background.

The Tabaxi Obsession table can help hone your character’s goals. For extra fun, roll a new result every few days that pass in the campaign to reflect your ever-changing curiosity.

Tabaxi Names
Each tabaxi has a single name, determined by clan and based on a complex formula that involves astrology, prophecy, clan history, and other esoteric factors. Tabaxi names can apply to both males and females, and most use nicknames derived from or inspired by their full names.

Clan names are usually based on a geographical feature located in or near the clan’s territory.

The following list of sample tabaxi names includes nicknames in parentheses.

Tabaxi Names: Cloud on the Mountaintop (Cloud), Five Timber (Timber), Jade Shoe (Jade), Left-Handed Hummingbird (Bird), Seven Thundercloud (Thunder), Skirt of Snakes (Snake), Smoking Mirror (Smoke).

Clan Names: Bright Cliffs, Distant Rain, Mountain Tree, Rumbling River, Snoring Mountain.