Sharkosian Empires

I like sharks. I don't know why. I think it has to do with the fact that they're these brutal creatures that have been apex predators for like a million years and they have those black utterly inhuman and emotionless eyes.

Anyway, so a long time ago I wrote this little bit on the blog here about sharks and dolphins and porpoises and their war for control of the cosmos. Recently I was trying to figure out a race for Jason's campaign and wandered through the Stormwrack 3.5 book to see if there was anything noteworthy in there. There wasn't. However, I did see the...I dunno what their name is, but they amount to killer whale humanoids. This got me to wondering if there was anything shark-like for me to play, something in the vein of the Atlantean from my Inconsistencies Continued story. There isn't. The closest thing is the Sahuagin. They have the ability to communicate with sharks and worship Sekolah the shark god. The problem with them is that in most of the literature they look like a fish with arms stuck on them. Ugly and ungainly. Not anything like the sleek and deadly killers that sharks are. Sometimes they look cool, but yeah, the majority of what I've seen is goofy and unthreatening.

So this thought process naturally led me to imagining an ocean world where many of the aquatic creatures we know and love have evolved (for whatever reason) into a humanoid form. Why after a million years or so a shark would suddenly need legs and arms and opposable thumbs instead of just growing more teeth, I have no idea. Whatever, logic is for other places.

So I imagine we have a bunch of humanoid aquatic races dividing up all the territory of an archipelago style world of water and smallish islands. I imagine this world primarily being populated by dolphins and sharks with the other well known fishies kind of tagging along for the ride. I imagine sharks being the most numerous, because I like sharks.

I imagine the sharks being heavy in the physical stats and light on the mental ones, with dolphins the opposite. I imagine the sharks basically being aquatic orcs, hordes of savagely tough warriors with a fairly binary view of life, you are either a predator or prey and lending their society a might makes right/toughest guy is in charge theme. The dolphins would be more cerebral I guess, kind of the opposite. Maybe they could be wizards, or psions. For some reason I feel that psionics would be more appropriate for this world than magic would. 

If the sharks were not too bloodthirsty, I think I'd have rays being their pals. Kind of a cartilaginous fish alliance or something. The porpoises would be allied with them as well because dolphins will straight up hatemurder a porpoise on sight. Killer whales, whales, eels, and other assorted races would exist, though I don't exactly have a theory about their alliances and whatnot.

I'm not sure how I would arrange the technology and whatnot. I think sharks would mostly rely on their teeth and maybe bone or coral weapon, probably rely on thick hide and Dexterity for armor with the equivalent of armor spikes to replicate their sandpapery skin. Dolphins, being mammals and smart, might have like iron or bronze and live on little islands near the water. 

I dunno, this isn't going anywhere, but it was fun to think about.