Dryad (ToF)

**Dryads** are a Near-Human race in the Tides of Fate universe. Among the first races that existed in their world such as the Elves, Dryads exist within the world of Carokiiv with quite a wide spread. A majority of the Dryads live within the continent of Kyrsides, in its south, alongside the various types of elves.

They are noted to be a race that isn't very optimized for magic casting, relying instead on their connection and power over nature and the natural form, due to their poor quality and quantity of naturally present magical circuits. However, due to their Elven like language and large mana pools, Dryads are capable users of incantations if needed, and they can still flash cast weak self-defense spells.

## Origin and Early History

Dryads, like all the other Near Human races, were present in Carokiiv long before the Beast Races appeared in the continent. During the era of the Beast Races, when they lorded over all the Near Human races, the Dryads included and used them as their slaves. The Dryads were the most able to fight with the Beast Races due to the fact they were endowed with natural power, but they were passive and the last to rebel.

When the fabled event known as the "Advent of Magic" came about, the Near Humans were granted Magic Circuits and the ability to use magic. The Dryads, like the other Near Human species, began to educate themselves in magic and fought back using magic and their natural powers. Despite the fact that the Beast Races resorted to genocide of the Near Human races to purge the world of mages, they ultimately failed to the superior number and were enslaved.

The Dryads never enslaved the Beast Races. They enthralled the Beast Races and used them as animals for their daily work, ultimately killing all of them for meat, making the Beast Races in the Dryad regions become the first to go extinct.

## Traits

Dryads are generally known to be beautiful in appearance, due to their natural abilities. Dryads are able to breed successfully with all other Near Human races, other than the Natives of Flinrock, the Asterians, similar to the other Near Humans. Dryads are all fair skinned and possess delicate features. Uncommon or impossible hair colors like green and pink are a lot more common among the Dryad populations. All Dryads are noted to be female, with no known exception.

Dryads, however, do have the ability to morph their appearance, unlike the other races, due to a natural power they have possessed even before magic, known as the "Natural Formshift". This ability allows them to modify their own biology within certain limits using mana, without even Circuits. The Dryads were thus probably one of the first "magic users" to exist.

This Natural Formshift allows Dryads to turn into most mammalian species of animal in full or partial transformation. It further can amplify their strength, modify their skin to other materials like chitin, or even rewrite their biology to change proportions and gender. This is also how Dryads reproduce, as they are able to mimic a male physiology temporarily if required. However, other than minor changes such as body proportion and eternal youth, which do not change the biological make up, all changes with Natural Formshift are temporary and eventually revert. Thus Dryads cannot permanently become animals, plants or males.

Hybrid children born of Dryads and the men of other races do have a fixed gender of male or female, and do not have access to a Dryad's "Natural Formshift" power. However, they can possess certain abilities of their Dryad parent and the higher quality of Magical Circuitry of the other races. Should these Hybrids have children with a Dryad, all their male children will be Hybrids, and all their female children full blooded Dryads.

Dryads are known to possess and extremely poor affinity for Flash Casting magic due to their low count of circuits and the low quality of circuits in their bodies. While they have very large mana pools, due to their circuit counts this also regenerates very slowly. As such Dryads use incantations to invoke powerful spells that change the tides of battle, relying on very cheap spells and their Natural Formshift to buy time.

Dryads heal faster than normal due to their connection with the natural and how they can rewrite their biology. Animals are almost always friendly to them unless provoked, and said animals will even come to the aid of a Dryad if they are actually attacked.

Due to their connection with nature and their ability to shift their body physiology, Dryads can easily use mana in combat to temporarily boost their physical parameters by increasing muscle mass and skin hardness for strikes. Their connection to nature can also enthrall an animal to aid them, or even call on plants to protect them. Once a day, a Dryad can even forcefully rewrite their own biology to become a Beast like entity, or call on all animals in a large region to their defense.

On the whole, Dryads are most powerful where nature is abundant, and when they are able to call upon the aid of the natural to protect them. Even then, their natural strength also makes Dryads capable warriors and fighters in hand to hand, even without aid from their natural forest habitats and its inhabitants. Their good knowledge of the natural also makes them excellent survivalists.

## Other miscellaneous details

Dryads lead a simple and peaceful lifestyle free of worries in general, when they are with their own native peoples. They tend to avoid conflict if they are able to, and generally dislike hurting others, seeing life as something sacred and not something to be taken lightly. They know magic is powerful and almost omnipotent as a whole, but they do not chase magic as an ideal, and do not place a huge focus on it.

Dryads of most villages are mostly kindhearted and charitable, being more than happy to host people from other races, and only responding with hostility if hostile situations escalate too far. The only reason why the Dryad Regions are not populated by other races, in fact, is due to the backwater living conditions, and the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of the Dryads, which can be unattractive to many.

Dryads do not practice marriage within their own communities, and freely mate among each other, raising their daughters in a communal setting for most part. However, they do not mind marrying male members of other Near Human races. They do not seem to be open to relationships with non Dryad females, though, possibly because they do not like to perform the male role in any relationship.

Dryads are generally very liberal in most ways, although this is also due to their single gendered society and practice of living in only small communities where issues are easily resolved via individual negotiation. Dryads do not mind, though, if their freedoms are taken away, and prefer to avoid conflict if they can, which lead to some categorizing them as "submissive". Due to the single race, single gender make up of their society and natural powers, problems like sexism, racism, discrimination against the disabled and such do not exist in their society.

Dryads are known to dislike elves due to the warmongering attitudes of elves, and how unstable elven society is due to immense political machinations that constantly take place there. They also defended themselves from elven incursions many times as the elves seek to expand their dominion and this has done nothing to improve the relations between both races.

Dryads know magic is powerful, but as they are naturally not very good at it, they have built their way of living with minimal magic, and it is rare for a Dryad to aspire to being a sorceress. Being a magic user rarely works to give a positive first impression to a Dryad, who see it as just another form of strength. They are also not very concerned if an individual has no Magic Circuits, although they will encourage such people to go to the human continent of Betoriv for Circuit Drawing, which is beneficial.

Dryad names are very simple, and are always two parted. They have a personal given name of a feminine nature, and their village name, which signifies which village they come from. Due to how Dryads in their native villages are raised together by all the adults, they rarely know, or need to know who is their true mother in their native region, thus their last name signifies the only unit they can feel a connection to - their village. Should a Dryad choose to go to another village to live permanently, she can easily change her last name to reflect that change. Dryads that marry elves, dwarves or humans will naturally adopt the given last names of their spouses and discard their village name, as this grants them a closer connection to their families and is in line with their naming system.