Palpatine's silent shadow
For years, one figure stood just behind the Chancellor's chair and said almost nothing. Sly Moore — pale, hairless, colorless-eyed — kept the soon-to-be-Emperor's darkest secrets and let no one read what was behind her face. She was an Umbaran, and secrecy was not a job for her people. It was the whole culture.
Meet the Umbaran, the newest playable species in SWURPG: the Shadow People of a world without a sun.
The world without a sun
Umbara sits deep inside the occluding Ghost Nebula, cut off from ordinary starlight and wrapped in permanent twilight. Nothing there grows toward a sun, because there isn't one — the forests light themselves, bioluminescent plants and animals glowing in the dark, and the whole planet runs on a technology that outstripped the rest of the galaxy while nobody was watching. Sealed away in the gloom, the Umbarans turned inward and built something less like a nation than a long, patient game.
During the Clone Wars, that isolation turned bloody. Umbara seceded to the Separatists, and the Republic sent clone troopers down into the dark to take it back — a grinding campaign fought against Umbaran militia and their own alien war-machines beneath a sky that never lightened. It became one of the war's grimmest chapters, and it's where most people first saw the Shadow People fight.
Eyes made for the dark
An Umbaran's eyes are the thing you don't forget: large, pale, and all but colorless, evolved to catch every scrap of light on a sunless world. They see into the ultraviolet, and they read heat and movement in blackness that would leave a Human blind — but the same eyes flinch from glare, and a sudden flash leaves an Umbaran dazzled for a moment they can't spare. Their skin runs pale, chalk-white to a cold, faintly blue cast, and many are hairless and favor stark high-collared robes that make them look like carved figures gliding through the murk.
Then there's the culture. Umbaran society is a ladder of nearly a hundred ranks, and the ambition of an ordinary Umbaran life is to climb it — by flattery, blackmail, alliance, and betrayal. They're called masters of misdirection because they earn it: an Umbaran rarely says a true thing plainly, reads the people across the table like a datapad, and treats a conversation as a duel fought with implication.
The build — the one who sees in the dark
In SWURPG, the Umbaran plays as the party's eye and its liar — the character who spots the ambush in a lightless corridor, reads the client who's hiding something, and sells a cover story without a flicker.
- DEX +2 / WIS +1 / CON −2 — quick and observant, but slight; an Umbaran wins by knowing more than everyone else in the room, not by trading blows.
- Dark-Adapted Eyes — Darkvision 60 ft. But eyes made for the dark are pained by glare: a sudden bright light (a flare, sunlight, a stun-flash) gives you Disadvantage on attacks and sight-based Perception until the end of your next turn. The gift and the weakness are the same eyes.
- Ultraviolet Sight — you see a spectrum others can't hide in, so camouflage, smoke, and shadow rarely fool you: Advantage on Perception to spot the hidden and the obscured.
- Masters of Misdirection — Advantage on Deception. You almost never reveal a true thought, and it shows at the table.
- Caste-Bred Insight — raised among schemers, you read people well: Advantage on Insight to catch a lie or a hidden motive.
No trained skills come free — an Umbaran's edge is all in the eyes and the read. It's a species that rewards playing the long game: gathering secrets, managing appearances, and turning darkness and information into weapons.
Build an Umbaran in the Character Builder →
Just don't expect them to tell you what they're really planning.