To know you, I must fight you
Brianna the Handmaiden fought nearly every stranger she took the measure of — not out of aggression, but because to an Echani that is simply how you learn who someone is. A fight, to them, is a conversation more honest than words.
Meet the Echani, the newest playable species in SWURPG: a near-human people of chalk-pale skin, white-silver hair, and silver eyes, reckoned among the finest duelists in the galaxy's long memory.
A caste of duelists
Echani are so uniform that outsiders can't tell them apart — siblings look like reflections, and a whole squad of them seems cut from one silver template. They run lithe and light, built for movement rather than for soaking punishment, and they carry the still, economical poise of people who have been sparring since before they could speak.
Their homeworld is Eshan, seat of a matriarchal confederacy called the Six Sisters, governed by the all-female Echani Command. At the center of their culture sits a single idea: to know a person fully, you must fight them. Echani sparring is a language — a skilled one reads intent, mood, and honesty in how an opponent shifts their weight, then predicts the next move before it lands. Their duels forbid armor and anything that restricts motion, and even off the dueling ground they train light and eschew heavy plate. They are famous smiths, too: the vibroswords carried across a thousand worlds descend from Echani designs, and the unarmed art the galaxy calls Teräs Käsi was theirs first.
Not every branch stayed noble. On Thyrsus, a line of Echani hardened into the Sun Guards — a mercenary order that drifted toward the Sith and hired out as elite bodyguards. It was silver-armored Sun Guards who stood at the shoulder of the Muun financier Hego Damask, the public face of the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis, in the decades before the Republic fell.
The build — the duelist
In SWURPG, the Echani play as a glass-cannon duelist: quick, perceptive, and lethal one-on-one.
- DEX +2 / WIS +1 / CHA −2, trained in Insight — a duelist's frame and a reader's eye, wrapped in a closed, expressionless caste manner outsiders find cold.
- Read the Body — once per short rest, when a creature you can see attacks you, you read the strike coming and impose Disadvantage on that attack roll. But not while two or more enemies crowd you within 5 feet: a press of bodies overwhelms your read.
- Teräs Käsi — your unarmed strikes deal 1d4 Kinetic damage, and you're proficient with the Teräs Käsi Bracers, the exotic weapon of the Echani art.
- Silver Reflexes — you read the first movement of a fight before others register it: +2 to initiative.
- Slight Frame — lithe and lightly built, you're easily bullied by bigger foes: Disadvantage on checks and saves to resist being grappled, shoved, or knocked prone.
It's a kit that rewards the clean single duel and punishes the swarming melee — exactly the fight an Echani is trained to seek, and the one they'll maneuver to avoid. Bolt on a class and be the blade nobody sees coming until it's already answered.
The other bodyguard
The Echani weren't the first to guard the Muun bankers' ledgers. Before the Sun Guards took over, that duty belonged to a very different kind of muscle — the stocky, bony-plated enforcers newly arrived alongside them. Meet their opposite number: the Iotran.
Build your own
The Echani are live now in the Character Builder — pick the species, choose a class, roll a silver name, and export a printable sheet.
Step into the circle. Let them show you who they are.