[ Outsiders > Celestials > Animal Lords ]
Lords of the [ Land | Past | Skies | Tundra | Waters ]
[ Ammonite | Azhdarcho | Coelacanth | Eurypterid | Indrik | Moa | Sabretooth | Temnospondylus | Tuatara | Lords in Brief ]
Moa Lord
Seyhrain Dinornis, Te Kura. Planar animal lord [she/her] N
Realm: Pangaea / The Moa Lord’s Atoll
Symbol: A three-toed footprint surrounded by scattered feathers, carved into greenstone (pounamu)
The Moa Lord, who calls herself Te Kura, stands nine feet tall at her full height. Her humanoid form towers over most visitors with the same imposing presence her kin once commanded across the grasslands of the Prime. Her legs are her glory—impossibly long, corded with muscle. When she’s in her moa form, they end in three-toed feet equipped with talons that could gut a giant with a single kick. In her humanoid form, she’s a little more refined. But while her legs are strong, she hardly uses her arms. She’s not a fan of opposable thumbs, perhaps because they remind her of her most hated enemy: humanity.
Te Kura’s wears a magnificent cloak that shifts from russet-brown at the shoulders to deep bronze at the hem, each plume as long as a shortsword and just as sharp when her legendary temper flares. Her neck stretches gracefully upward, supporting a head that seems almost too small for her massive frame—until you see her eyes. Those amber orbs burn with the accumulated rage of nine extinct species, tracking movement with the predatory focus of a creature that remembers when nothing on land could outrun her kind.
When the Moa Lord moves, it’s with the rolling, ground-eating stride that carries her kin across her realm, the Moa Lord’s Atoll, in search of feeding grounds. She can shift from motionless to full sprint in a heartbeat, at speeds that would outrun a centaur.
Speed was our salvation, cutter, until the slow-thinking apes with their patient traps made it our doom
—The bitter words of the Moa Lord
Te Kura’s embittered worldview stems from the Paradox of Velocity—she has come to accept that the very traits that allowed her people to thrive can become fatal liabilities when circumstances changed. She’s spent centuries analyzing how her people’s greatest strength—their unmatched running speed—became meaningless against humanity and its ranged weapons, and was no match for their carefully laid snares.
Philosophically, she’s practically a Cipher. The Moa Lord believes in swift decisive action, viewing hesitation and deliberation as the first step toward extinction. This makes her quick to anger and even quicker to act, for she believes that most problems can be solved by either outrunning them or trampling them flat. She sees the slow, patient approach favoured by Lords of the Past like the Tuatara Lord as the very mindset that led to their species’ downfall.
The moa took a huge evolutionary gamble—by becoming too large to hide, too heavy to fly, but powerful enough to dominate through sheer physical presence. Te Kura views the evolution of flightlessness by her people not as a loss but as a bold commitment to terrestrial supremacy, an attempt to join the thriving Lords of the Land, turning her back on the Lords of the Skies after they failed to act against the ulraehn all those years ago. It was a gamble that worked perfectly—until humans arrived with their tools and cunning.
Her Burning Obsessions
Te Kura seeks to reverse the tactical errors that led to moa extinction by studying human hunting patterns and developing countermeasures that could have saved her people. She visits the Outlands to watch human settlers, learning their tactics, their hunting techniques, and their social structures. with the obsessive focus of a general preparing for a war that already ended.
She’s spent centuries creating precise maps of every place on the Prime where moa bones have been found, every hunting camp where her people were butchered, every human village built on former moa nesting grounds. This isn’t an academic interest, cutter—chant goes she’s cataloguing a list of targets for a Reckoning.
Thunder on Legs
Te Kura embodies restless energy barely contained within a diplomatic facade. She greets (non-human) visitors with apparent warmth, but her hospitality masks constant motion—shifting weight from foot to foot, adjusting her feather cloak, scanning escape routes even during casual conversation. Her patience evaporates the moment anyone mentions evolution, adaptation, or natural selection—terms she considers insulting euphemisms for the genocide her beloved kin endured.
The slightest reference to human settlement, hunting, or primitive weapons is likely to send her into an explosive rage. She’s been known to chase offending visitors off her island, her rumbling war-screech echoing like thunder across the grasslands.
While quick to anger with humanoids, Te Kura shows fierce maternal care toward any flightless birds, including kenku or tengu. She has adopted cassowaries, rheas, and even young ostriches who wandered too far from their own realms, treating them as surrogate daughters despite species differences.
Warning to Planewalkers: Never approach the Moa Lord if you appear even remotely human, and never let her see you are carrying bows or arrows of any kind. She considers these to be tools of genocide and will respond with immediate violence.
We ruled the ground for sixty million years… until the apes arrived with their weapons of war. Well, I’ve learned things too. And when the time comes, I’ll show them what persistence really means
—Fighting talk from the Moa Lord
Source: Margarita, based on an idea by Greg Jensen. Canonwatch: Everything here is homebrew (in the context of Planescape at least, all of these prehistoric creatures roamed the world once upon a time!) The vengeful nature of the Moa Lord and her planning for battle was inspired by the Great Emu War—which was a real thing, that Australia LOST against the emu in 1932. I am not joking. The army had machine guns. Apparently they’re making it into a movie. You couldn’t make it up…
