They do not quit
The Iotran Brandsmen would chase a fugitive across a dozen systems and three sovereign borders to drag him home — and dare the diplomats to file a complaint.
Meet the Iotran, the newest playable species in SWURPG: a stocky, bony-plated people from the Outer Rim world of Iotra, bred by one of the most rigidly martial cultures in the galaxy into single-minded guards, enforcers, and bodyguards.
A world that is one big police force
Iotrans are short and dense, rarely taller than a meter and a half, with smooth skin from dark brown to near-black, broad flat-nosed faces, and no external ears. Their signature is bone: spotted, hairless heads carry knobbed protrusions at the temples, and short spikes stand out along their shoulders, elbows, and knuckles — natural plating that makes an unarmed Iotran a genuinely unpleasant thing to grapple.
They believe a society is only as stable as the strength that guards it, and they organize nearly everything around that conviction. Adolescents are conscripted into the Iotran Police Force around eighteen and serve some six years in the ranks; the eight highest officers of the IPF sit as the Joint Council and govern Iotra outright — the police are quite literally the state. From the IPF come the Brandsmen, elite enforcers licensed to pursue fugitives wherever they run, a mandate they read so broadly that off-world governments learned to brace for the diplomatic incident that tends to follow an Iotran across their border.
That reputation — durable, disciplined, relentless, for hire — is why Iotrans keep turning up at the shoulder of the wealthy and paranoid. In the last decades of the Republic, Iotran Brandsmen provided the security detail for the Muun financiers of the InterGalactic Banking Clan, standing guard over the galaxy's money until a Muun named Hego Damask — in truth the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis — replaced them with his own silver-armored Echani Sun Guards.
The build — the wall
In SWURPG, an Iotran plays as the party's wall: durable, watchful, and hard to shake.
- CON +1 / STR +1 / DEX −1, Speed 25, trained in Perception — solid, planted, and watchful, if slow on those short, dense legs.
- Bony Spurs — your natural plating gives +1 AC, and your unarmed strikes deal 1d4 Kinetic damage.
- Conscript Discipline — years drilled in the IPF ranks: Advantage on saves against being frightened, and proficiency with the Stun Baton every enforcer carries.
- Jurisdiction Be Damned — once you fix on a charge to protect or a quarry to run down, little short of death turns you aside: Disadvantage on Persuasion, and Disadvantage on any check or save to break off a pursuit, retreat, or stand down once you've committed.
It's a bodyguard's kit — the character who stands in the doorway and does not move, whose word, once given, is a fact the galaxy has to work around. Bolt on a class and be the wall the party stands behind.
Two ways to guard a vault
The Iotran and the Echani both did the same job — standing watch over the Muun bankers — and they could not be more different at the table. The Echani is a lithe duelist who reads you through the fight; the Iotran is a bony-plated wall that simply refuses to fall. Same post, opposite characters.
Build your own
The Iotran are live now in the Character Builder — pick the species, choose a class, roll a stony name, and export a printable sheet.
Take the post. Hold it.