The Dancer is a race of humanoids with long, powerful wings in place of arms and four-fingered claws that serve as hands. They live in expansive, feather-light palaces in the clouds that drift with the currents. They wield powerful innate magic that enables them to control the weather and sing songs only some can hear.

Dancers build their homes in the clouds, and follow them as they drift through the skies. This practice has forced them to become adaptable to new environments, but has also made their culture very open-minded. Since Dancer communities can split apart at any time, Dancers tend to form only superficial relationships with one another, even their own family. They trust easily and make friends quickly, but rarely make deeper connections. This makes them more resilient to loss and change, but it also makes them more vulnerable to loneliness.

Dancers choose low clouds beneath the strongest winds and use magically conjured materials to build their homes. They tend to build tall, slender, spires with open balconies that serve flying creatures well. Sometimes they can be seen from the ground, and many isolated communities that have never met Dancers in person have legends about these aerial wonders. It is the Dancers’ magic, in part, that keeps the clouds they live on stable. To keep them from dissipating, the elders in a Dancer community perform magical rituals every day. When some or all of the Elders die or lose the capacity to work the magic, their homes could fall to the ground.

Each Dancer has the ability to perform a magical ritual that involves a complex dance. The most common of these is the Weather Dance, which can influence weather conditions, but the more difficult Whisper Dance can communicate a message to another across vast distances. The potency of the dances is multiplied for each Dancer partaking in the ritual. In fact, it is nothing but an advanced form of the Weather Dance that the Elders perform to maintain their cloud homes. Normally, a Dancer will demand absolute privacy during a dance, so very few have seen one of these rituals performed.

A Dancer may be enticed into an adventuring lifestyle by a yearning to experience the world from a different perspective, a desire learn more about the land-dwelling creatures they observe so often from above, or a difference of beliefs with other Dancers.

Game Statistics

The following game statistics provide a suggestion for a playable Dancer race in D&D 5e.

  • Ability Score Increase: Your Dexterity score increases by 2, and your Charisma score increases by 1.
  • Age: Dancers live short but thrilling lives, reaching adulthood by the age of 14 and rarely living past 70 years.
  • Size: Tall but slender, Dancers are between 5 to 7 feet tall and average around 100 pounds. Your size is medium.
  • Speed: Your base walking speed is 30 feet, and you have a flying speed of 60 feet.

  • Ritual Magic: You have the ability to perform certain magical rituals. Each ritual takes 1 hour to perform, and you can perform one each day. You must be able to sing and dance freely throughout the entire hour.

    The Weather Dance

    You have the ability to control the weather to a mild degree. To perform the ritual, you must be outside for the full hour and must be able to see the sky. If you are blinded you cannot perform the ritual.

    When you complete the ritual, you can change the weather in one of the following ways:

    • Increase or decrease the wind speed by up to 10 miles per hour within one mile of you
    • Halve or double the level of precipitation within one mile of you
    • Disperse or conjure a small patch of cloud directly above you

    The change is effective for 24 hours after you complete the ritual.

    The Whisper Dance

    At third level, you gain the ability to send a message through the wind that only one person can hear. When you complete the ritual, you can cast the Sending spell once requiring no material components.

  • Languages: You can speak, read, and write Common and Auran.