Ronto

Rontos are towering, long-necked pack beasts — better than four metres at the head — that Jawas use to haul salvage and trade goods across the Tatooine wastes. Grey-brown, slab-sided and astonishingly patient, a ronto will carry a crushing load all day in temperatures that would put most draught animals down, and ask for very little water in return.

They are also, famously, a menace in traffic. A ronto's one great flaw is that it cannot abide anything that moves faster than it does, and the streets of Mos Eisley are full of exactly that. A speeder taken too fast past a loaded ronto will set the animal rearing and bolting through a crowded market, which is an expensive way to discover that your shortcut was not one. Jawa handlers plan routes around this the way a freighter captain plans around weather.

Their sense of smell is exceptional and is the reason Jawas tolerate the temperament — a ronto will find water, or a buried wreck, long before its handlers do. In a profession built on locating other people's abandoned machinery, that nose is worth a great deal of inconvenience.

The ronto is not built to be fought, it is built to complicate a fight. Its Skittish trait is the stat block — the moment a speeder, swoop or charging creature comes past, somebody is making a Survival check or losing control of a four-metre animal in a crowded space.

Use it as terrain with opinions: a chase through a market, a caravan under attack, a street fight where the loose ronto is a bigger problem than the people shooting. In a straight fight it is slow and front-loaded — a single stomp and a long reach swing — and it would rather leave than win.