System: Courage is Magic by LittleLunaMoonMatron
Ability Scores: +1 Knowledge, +1 Agility
Speed: 5 Squares (Ground), 4 Squares (Flight)
Racial Skill Trainings: History and Perception
Flying Creature: You may take Spirits, Destinies, and Merits that require flight.
Natural Predator: You are always considered to be armed. Treat your Unarmed Strikes as melee weapons of your level.
Riddle Me This: Whenever attempting to solve a riddle, or puzzle, you get an immediate second chance to do so if the first attempt fails, with no penalties. This is treated as one attempt and does not cost any additional actions. You also get the I’m a Treasure Hunter Merit for free, even if you do not meet the prerequisite.
Sensitive Ears: Your perked up ears are well-tuned to finding new creatures to pounce on. You receive a +5 Perception or Insight checks that involve hearing.
Vigilant Stone: You can temporarily transform into a stone statue of yourself. While in this state, you remain aware of your surroundings, require neither air nor sustenance, and become difficult to harm in any meaningful way (+5 AC, +1 point of Damage Reduction per Level, and any previously existing Ongoing Damage is put on hold). You also recover faster while you are stone, requiring only half the time for Short and Long Rests (30 minutes and 4 hour respectively).
These graceful and enigmatic predators are said to have once served as guardians of ancient tombs and treasuries in distant lands. Their ability to turn themselves into unyielding stone allows them to remain ever vigilant at their posts, though they must revert to flesh and blood should they decide to act. Many would be thieves have met their end due to the ever watchful gaze of a guardian sphinx.
Sphinxes greatly value cleverness and wit, and often take great pride in their ability to create (and solve) riddles, traps, and puzzles of all kinds. In fact, their love for such conundrums can sometimes be used to distract them from their posts. Beware though, for while they may reward a cleverly applied loophole or alternative answer, they have little tolerance for liars and cheats.
Play as a Sphinx if you want…
To be considered to be mysterious, clever, and wise
To come up with clever solutions to unusual problems
To be a predator among herbivores
To be mistaken as a statue while keeping watch over your friends and companions or guarding a specific location.
Prerequisite: Sphinx Only
Benefit: You are now more attuned with your Vigilant Stone form, enabling you to maintain your mobility while retaining the attendant AC and DR bonuses. However, you are still too heavy to swim or fly while you are in your stone form.
Prerequisite: Sphinx Only
Benefit: You are now more attuned with your Vigilant Stone form, increasing your DR to 2 per level while you are in that form.
It should be noted that, in setting, sphinxes are mostly a blend of feline, avian, and pony physiologies rather than a blend of feline, avian, and human physiologies, although tabbies still have human style breasts regardless. This is part of why their bodies and heads have pony-like proportions.
Tabbies tend to outnumber toms due to a somewhat uneven male to female birth gender ratio, although the actual demographic varies from population to population.
This is what I came up with for the Sphinx race when one of my players who really likes cats stated that he wanted to play one in the Courage is Magic campaign that I was starting up. This was well before any sphinxes had made any canonical appearances in the show itself, and also before the My Little Pony movie had been announced so the cat-like Abyssal race wasn’t a thing yet either.
They are loosely based on the sphinxes of Egyptian and Grecian mythology, which is one of the reasons why my tabletop gaming group agreed that the tabbies should have human style boobs between their forelegs. Well, that, and everyone thought that it would be hilarious to have a race in that actually had prominent exposed breasts in an otherwise mostly cartoonish setting. Said group at the time included a married couple and the girlfriend of the married man’s brother. And later, a new female player decided that she also wanted to play a sphinx character, and made Nightshade, who while nowhere near as disturbingly promiscuous as the first PC sphinx, Siri of the Questionable Morals, has no problems with proudly displaying her bare bosom to the world like every other tabby PC or NPC that has shown up so far.