The crowd in the arena
Everyone remembers the set-piece from Attack of the Clones: Anakin, Padmé, and Obi-Wan chained to posts in a stone arena while three monsters are loosed on them. What people forget is the crowd. That screaming stadium of leathery-winged insectoids was a whole species — the ones who built the arena, filled the stands, and had already turned the caverns below into the factory that would arm a war.
Meet the Geonosian, the newest playable species in SWURPG.
Red rock and radiation
Geonosis is a harsh world — cratered red stone, blowing grit, a broken debris ring overhead, and enough hard radiation to kill anything that isn't built for it. Geonosians are built for it. A hard chitin exoskeleton armors the body and shrugs off the radiation storms; multi-jointed limbs end in toes that grip bare rock; and from most Geonosians' shoulders sprout a pair of veined, leathery wings fast enough to lift a warrior off the ground and drop it behind a firing line.
They answered their brutal homeworld by going up and down at once — raising jagged spires from the desert and honeycombing the ground beneath with catacombs, breeding chambers, and foundries. Whole cities run on drones who never see the sky.
The hive, the foundry, and the arena
Geonosian society is a strict three-tier hive: a single queen anchoring the colony and the low telepathic hum of its hive mind, a thin scheming aristocracy that actually rules, and below them the drone castes — bred by the batch for service, labor, war, or fabrication. What they do best is build. Geonosian foundries turned out battle droids by the million for the Confederacy, and Geonosian engineers drafted the first plans for the Death Star. They settle honor in the arena, and their Gordarl Weaponsmiths gave the galaxy a whole family of sonic arms.
The build — the winged skirmisher
In SWURPG the Geonosian plays as a mobile skirmisher who takes the high ground, endures what drops others, and fights with weapons built for its own hands.
- DEX +2 / INT −1 / WIS −1 / CHA −1 — quick and deadly on the wing, but hive-bred: a Geonosian thinks and speaks for the swarm, not itself.
- Winged Flight — fly at your full speed (not in Medium or Heavy armor). The wings are fragile, though: take slashing damage and you risk being knocked from the air, so pick your dives.
- Chitinous Carapace — +1 AC from hard chitin, and you're hardened against the radiation that scours your homeworld — advantage on saves against it, and no radiation sickness.
- Sunless Eyes — Darkvision 60 ft, from a life in the lightless spire-tunnels.
- Hive-Mind Wiring — the cost of a hive-shaped mind: Disadvantage on saves against fear, charm, and domination.
- Gordarl Arms — you start proficient with the species' own weapons: the Geonosian Sonic Blaster, the emplaced LR1K Sonic Cannon, and the Static Pike.
Those two sonic weapons are new to the catalog, too — both deal Sonic damage that slides right past the reflective armor that stops blaster bolts. The Geonosian is the rare species that brings its own arsenal to the table.
Build a Geonosian in the Character Builder →
Just don't expect it to fight fair — or on the ground.