Races of Kerebra: Voor Culture part 1

A voor is a strange creature. Their bodies consist of a huge eye in a mass of slender tentacles. Their skin is a deep, dark purple, soft and rubbery to the touch, and the iris of their large central eye is usually a striking color such as pink, green or yellow. They seem to float roughly five feet above the ground, but are in fact walking on their many long tentacles, which serve as both their feet and hands. Their tentacles are surprisingly dextrous, able to manipulate any item with ease. They also use their tentacles to produce speech, in a manner no scholar truly understands, and are able to produce sounds that mimic human speech almost perfectly.

Nobody knows where the voor came from, or when they entered Kerebra. But they are not native to the plane, and their alien forms point to some kind of extra planar origin. They might have travelled to Kerebra at an early point in the planes history, or perhaps they simply seeded the plane with their spores at some point. The voor themselves don't know either, and Kerebra is the only home they have ever known.

Voor have a parasitic relationship with Kerebra, but they are not harmful or hostile beings. In fact voor are curious and friendly, and though their strange shape might unnerve or concern, they are a welcoming people who value friendship and go out of their way to make friends and establish positive relations with the people of Kerebra.

Voor society is based on loose family units, though family is a bit of a misnomer as voor do not breed in the human sense of the word. When a voor reaches sexual maturity, they develop a set of special tentacles that are able to release spores. These spores adhere to the crystals that are so common throughout Kerebra, and slowly grow into lichen-like patches of purple growths. These growths then feed on the ambient psionic energy of the crystals, until they produce buds that slowly grow into young voor over a period of a few months. Voor are long lived by human standards, often living to 500 years old, and voor younglings spend roughly 50 years as larvae before they mature into an adolescent stage. Voor younglings are incapable of speech and are very simple minded, little more than animals that don't stray far from the crystals they are attached to by special umbilical tentacles. Slowly, as they absorb psionic energy from Kerebra, their minds mature until they reach the adolescent stage and learn to speak. Scholars among the Dreamdivers believe the voor are actually absorbing personality fragments from the Worldmind, and that their mature personalities are developed from the countless such fragments the voor has digested through it's larval stage. The voor themselves have offered no opinion on this theory.

Voor minds are alien things, governed by a logic that seems strange and unpredictable to humans. A voor might spend decades obsessing over tiny details of its surroundings, dedicating all its waking ours to perfecting their skills at making perfect neat pyramids from small stones. Another might decide to meet a certain number of new people each day, cataloguing their hair and eye color in books they throw away once a week. Why voor develop these obsessions is unknown, but the voor themselves treat this kind of behaviour as perfectly ordinary and don't understand why humans think its strange or unnerving.

Between these obsessive episodes and the long stretches of time voor spend attached to crystals in quiet slumber, many voor experience long periods of heightened activity, in which they are driven to seek out other people to socialize. Such active voor often take up jobs in communities, or take to adventuring to satisfy their wanderlust and curiosity. During these states the voor still follow their alien logic, tempered by their desire to be accepted by their chosen community or group. A voor might not understand why humans do what they do, and will often question their actions and motives, but almost all of them endeavour to emulate what they see and treat the human condition as a fascinating subject of study. Concepts like love, family and friendship, religious faith and the need to eat drink are endlessly fascinating to them.