TFL/Varana

## Varana

**Appearance**: Varana are upright, bipedal lizards who stand about 4' tall. They have stubby tails. They communicate among themselves primarily through scent glands, but use a series of hisses, wheezes, and shrieks for urgent distant communication.
**Common traits**: Carnivorous, cold-blooded, sleepy.
**Notable quirks**:
**Psychological Constraints**: neutral for Callous, Chauvinism, Chummy, Concentration, Curiosity, Imaginative, Playful, Selfish, and Suspicious
Varana are aggressive users of genetic engineering, and modify their children to live on extremely marginal worlds. They have high fecundity, and the two traits combine to allow them to expand rapidly into any place they can survive. Other civilizations are concerned with this far too rapid expansion.

Varanasi can lay clutches of about two dozen eggs every year. These offspring reach maturity in about 6 years.

They often relocate pioneering families to remote and mostly desolate worlds. Varana do not reproduce as rapidly (or mature well) in spin-gravity for unknown reasons, and Varani geneticists have not managed to eliminate this defect without doing severe damage to the brain structures of their offspring. Thus, the Varana are forced to exclusively colonize planets, and the Varani systems of the Continuance Protective Concordant have abnormally low numbers of Space stations compared to other Star Nations.

The Varana were a space-faring race when Solar League explorers arrived in the Fringe, though they hadn't discovered Hyperspace. The Solar League didn't give Necklin Field technology to the Varana, but they eventually figured it out from observation and began expanding, but quickly ran into the established boundaries of the Confederated Stars of Ursa and the Vrazskla-z Authority.

The Varani scent language is difficult for most outsiders to understand or speak, and non-Varana are limited to Broken understanding. The Varani Distance Shrieks has been adopted into a more useful language for long distance and cross-species communication, but it is deliberately a trade pidgin that no one, even the Varana themselves, can speak at better than Accented. It just lacks too many words, though it has an unsurprisingly complete vocabulary for radio communication and Spacecraft operation.

## Varana Racial Template [-10 CP]

*Advantages*:
* Blunt Claws [1]
* Chameleon 1 [5]
* Discriminatory Smell [15]
* Extra Arms (tail) (Extra-flexible +50%; Short -50%; Weak -50%) [5]
* Nictitating Membrane 1 [1]
* Night Vision 3 (Easy technology replacement, -80%) [1]
* Sharp Teeth [1]
* SM -1 [5]

*Perks*: None
*Disadvantages*:
* Bad Grip 1 [-5]
* Cold Blooded (stiffen up at 50deg) [-5]
* Colorblind [-10]
* Extra Sleep 2 [-4]
* G-Intolerance (0.1 G, Cosmic: Always suffers penalties in spin gravity; Accessibility: Only in spin gravity) [-10]

*Quirks*: None
*Features*: Altered Sex Ratio [0]
*Recommend traits*: Varana colonists often buy off Cold Blooded. Colonists often have some combination of Doesn't Breathe (Oxygen Storage), Filter Lungs, Regeneration (Radiation Only), Resistance to Metabolic Hazards in general or to specific hazards of a colony, Temperature Tolerance, and Ultravision.
Varana treat any instance of spin gravity as two increments of higher gravity, in addition to any effects for the actual amount of felt gravity. When dealing with mass gravity, they have the normal G increment of 0.2.