Tortle

Appearance

Tortles are stocky, powerfully built humanoids with the heads and shells of great sea turtles. Their shells are thick and domed, often patterned in swirls of sea-green, sand, or dull slate, with barnacle scars and scrapes that tell the story of reefs climbed and storms survived. Their skin ranges from kelp-green to muddy brown or grey, with darker speckling across the limbs and face.
  Their hands and feet are broad and strong, with short claws and webbing between the digits that makes them powerful swimmers even when weighed down with gear. Tortle eyes tend to be calm and dark, set in wrinkled faces that always look a little bit tired and a little bit amused. Clothing is simple and practical: short vests, harnesses, and belts that can be shrugged off in the water, along with wide-brimmed hats, sun veils, and worn jewellery made from shells, driftglass, and knotwork charms.

Culture & Society

Tortle culture is built around wandering, self-reliance, and the belief that the world is best appreciated with your own two eyes. Young tortles strike out alone or in small sibling bands as soon as they are able, hunting, fishing, and trading their labour along the edges of raft-towns and coastal villages. Settlements of tortles exist, but they are more like seasonal moots than permanent cities: safe places to share news, trade tools, swap stories, and then part ways again without resentment.
  They delight in learning new crafts, especially anything involving tools, fortifications, boats, or clever fishing tricks. A tortle can lose years happily apprenticed in a human shipyard, a dwarven anchor-forge, or an elven ropewalk before the urge to move on tugs at them again. Religion is usually a quiet, personal thing: many tortles honour gentle sea and weather spirits, small household gods of hearth and tide, or whatever patron deity first caught their imagination in a story.
  Tortle names are short and easy to shout over wind and waves, often no more than two syllables, and almost never gendered. Names like Baka, Nulka, Sunny, Ubo, or Xopa are common, but a tortle may change their name several times in a lifetime to match new skills, new outlooks, or simply a joke that stuck.

Biology & Lifespan

Tortles hatch from thick-shelled eggs in small clutches. The strange twist of their life cycle is that most tortle children are raised by parents who are already old and near the end of their years. Those elders spend their last months or seasons passing on everything they know: survival tricks, fishing songs, legends, and advice on which raft-towns to trust. By the time a tortle is a year old, it can walk upright, swim confidently, speak clearly, and usually finds itself an orphan armed with stories and a bundle of tools.
  Physically, tortles reach full size quickly and remain hardy for most of their lives, living on average around fifty to sixty years. The urge to nest and leave behind offspring usually arrives late. When a tortle feels age settling into its joints, it seeks a partner, lays a clutch of eggs, and spends its final years guarding a fortified nursery compound and teaching the next generation. Illness and injury aside, the end of a tortle's life is often peaceful, spent telling stories by lamplight while little shells listen.
  Tortles are diurnal by habit but are deeply affected by the sky. They speak of the sun and moon as the "eyes" that watch the world. Days when one or both are visible comfort them, while heavy cloud, deep fog, and long stretches beneath decks or underground can make them anxious and withdrawn.

Homelands & Environment

Most tortles are born on remote sandy islets, low coral atolls, or hidden beaches that sit a little apart from the main raft-towns. These birth-compounds are carefully walled with stone, driftwood, and scavenged timbers, designed to hold against storms, curious predators, and the occasional pirate. Once grown, tortles scatter across the High Seas, treating almost any coastline or floating settlement as fair hunting and trading grounds.
  They are most at ease where sky and water meet: open decks, sun-warmed planks, quiet lagoons, mangrove channels, and tidepools that mirror the moon. Many feel distinctly uncomfortable in cramped, windowless spaces below the waterline or in underground caverns, and will sleep on deck, in a hammock under the stars, or even in a small coracle tied beside a larger ship rather than spend a night without the sky overhead. Tortles are strong swimmers but prefer relatively shallow, sunlit waters where reefs, sandbanks, and kelp forests offer both food and shelter.

Relations with Other Peoples

Despite spending so much time alone, tortles are genuinely social and usually slow to judge. They have no traditional enemies among the peoples of the High Seas, and many go out of their way to befriend "interesting" neighbours. Long friendships with tritons, sea elves, locathah, water genasi, and lizardfolk are common, especially with those who share their love of practical craft and the open water.
  On the raft-towns, tortles often work as dock wardens, carpenters, wall-builders, and quiet mediators, trading steady labour for a safe berth and a place at the fire. Humans, dwarves, elves, and smallfolk tend to see them as reliable if slightly odd companions. Giff and goliaths admire their toughness, while grung and kenku often enjoy their dry humour. Even more grim or suspicious folk, such as orcs or certain tieflings, usually respect a tortle's honesty once they realise there is no hidden angle. A tortle's closest friends are sometimes the only ones who will ever see them both at the start of their wandering life and at the very end, when they finally settle to guard their own hatchlings.