Being outnumbered is simply Tuesday
Getting surrounded is the thing every Small character spends a fight trying to avoid. Smaller reach, fewer hit points, and a rules system where two enemies on opposite sides of you get +2 to hit. The Lannik are the species that treats this as an opening.
They're playable now, in the catalog and the Character Builder, and the kit is built on a single historical fact: the Lannik have been at war with each other for thousands of years. Not a generation of unrest — a feudal warrior culture that has been fighting through vassalage, inherited grievance and clan obligation for long enough that courage stopped being a virtue and became the minimum qualification for being taken seriously at all.
The ears, and the honest mouth
An adult Lannik averages about 1.2 metres, stocky through the chest and shoulders, with skin running through orange, red, purple, blue and green tones and hair that generally matches the skin it grows from. Legends sources describe them as looking like a stiff wind could blow them over, which is roughly how they appear to people who have never watched one fight.
The ears are the defining organ. Long, pointed and markedly droopy, hanging well clear of the skull, rotating independently to track faint or distant sound. A Lannik hears the footfall around the corner and the weapon being drawn behind a crowd. The same organ is a liability in the wrong place — the ears snag in tight quarters and turn genuinely painful in thin atmospheres, so a Lannik on a mountain pass or a leaking hull is working against their own best sense.
Then there's the mouth. A Lannik says what they think regardless of what it costs, and treats that as a point of personal honour rather than a failure of manners. It has earned the species a flat galactic reputation for rudeness among people who mistake bluntness for hostility. It is also why a Lannik is terrible at courtly negotiation and excellent at cutting through someone else's lie.
The build
| Ability modifiers | DEX +1, WIS +1, STR −1 |
| Size / speed | Small, 30 ft |
| Skill | Endurance |
| Ear to the Wall | Advantage on Perception checks that rely on hearing |
| Contempt for Odds | While 2+ hostile creatures are within 10 ft: +1 to melee attack rolls, and advantage on saves against being Frightened |
| Says What He Thinks | Disadvantage on Persuasion checks |
Contempt for Odds is the whole character in one line, and it's deliberately a melee bonus. It does nothing if you kite — you have to be in among them, with at least two hostiles inside 10 feet, before it turns on. That's a Small character with a STR penalty being paid to stand in the worst square on the map, which is exactly the trade the lore describes. The advantage against Frightened matters more than it looks, too: fear effects are what usually break a front-liner's position, and a Lannik who can't be moved off the spot keeps the bonus running.
Ear to the Wall is a genuine scouting tool rather than a flavour line, because SWURPG has no passive skills — every contest is an active roll, so advantage on hearing-based Perception is advantage on the roll that actually happens when someone's waiting in the dark corridor ahead. And Says What He Thinks is the most entertaining downside we've written in a while. You are not the party face. You are the reason the party needed a face.
Even Piell kept the scars
The Lannik the galaxy knows is Even Piell, pulled out of poverty on a war-torn world, trained young into a fierce warrior and gifted swordsman, and seated on the Jedi High Council through the Stark Hyperspace War, the Yinchorri Uprising and the Eriadu Trade Summit. He was notably more outspoken than his colleagues — his ideas ran radical and always direct, which is about as Lannik as a Jedi Master gets.
The detail that defines him happened at home. When Red Iaro fighters stormed a meeting between Lannik's prince and Corellian diplomats, Piell cut down six of them, saved the royal family and the delegation, and lost his left eye along with much of his face. His fellow Jedi urged him to have the scars healed. He refused, and kept them for the rest of his life, because he read them as a record of what he had survived. That attitude is species-wide: a warrior culture that has fought for thousands of years does not regard an unmarked face as an achievement.
Not every Lannik is a Jedi. Skrood commanded the raider Sickle for the Nihil during the High Republic. Senator Zast Tri'vak tried to sell intelligence on both sides of the Clone Wars to a Hutt and was run through by Asajj Ventress for it. By the Imperial era Lanniks were rarely seen beyond their own system at all, so one walking into a port is already an event — which is either useful cover or exactly the wrong kind of attention.
Build your own
The Lannik are live in the Character Builder — the ears, the odds, and a mouth that will absolutely cost you the negotiation. Read the full species profile for the lore and the stat breakdown, or browse the rest of the species catalog. They complete the named Jedi High Council roster in SWURPG, alongside the Quermian, Thisspiasian, Tholothian and Ongree — with Yoda's species, which canon has never named, as the permanent exception.