MagnaGuard (IG-100)

When General Grievous strode the bridge of his flagships during the Clone Wars, a pair of cloaked killers shadowed him on either side: IG-100 MagnaGuards, the bodyguard droids he kept closer than any living officer. Two of them, IG-101 and IG-102, were aboard the Providence-class dreadnought Invisible Hand over Coruscant when Grievous ordered them to cut down Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. They are remembered less for that fight (the two Jedi destroyed them in short order) than for what they represented: the one threat the Separatists' droid armies posed that could actually trade blows with a lightsaber-wielder and live to do it again.

A MagnaGuard stands roughly two meters tall, a lean humanoid frame of duranium plating built to deliberately unsettle. Holowan Mechanicals classified them as Self-Motivating Heuristically Programmed Combat Droids, but the silhouette is pure intimidation: a single dull-red photoreceptor set in an expressionless faceplate, no mouth, no expression to read. Their signature is durability that borders on the grotesque. A MagnaGuard can keep fighting after losing limbs, and even decapitation does not stop one, because a third optical sensor is built into its abdomen, letting a headless droid keep tracking and swinging. Their primary weapon is the electrostaff, a double-ended polearm forged from phrik alloy so it cannot be severed by a lightsaber, its charged tips able to stop an organic heart after a few seconds of sustained contact.

The MagnaGuard was never a mass-line battle droid in the mold of the B1s. Holowan Mechanicals built it to Grievous's personal specification, and the design carries his fingerprints everywhere. The cloaks, head wraps, and tribal markings draped over the bare metal are a direct homage to the Izvoshra, the elite Kaleesh warrior-guard the cyborg general kept in his life before the Clone Wars, on his ravaged homeworld of Kalee. Where most Separatist droids were faceless attrition, these were a vanity project and a status symbol, a mechanical echo of the honor guard a Kaleesh warlord was owed.

The detail that makes them genuinely dangerous is how they were taught to fight. The MagnaGuards shipped as heuristic combat units, capable of learning, but Grievous had their factory tactical programming wiped clean. Count Dooku had trained Grievous personally in the lightsaber combat forms of the Jedi Order, and Grievous in turn drilled those same forms into his guards, so a MagnaGuard does not fence like a machine running a script. It fences like a student of the same master who taught the general, which is exactly why a squad of them could press a Jedi instead of merely dying in front of one. Holowan also produced specialized variants kitted with blaster cannons, RPS-6 rocket launchers, laser-dart projectors, tow cables, and even personal cloaking fields.

Their combat record across the war is a string of near-misses against the galaxy's best. A team of MagnaGuards once cornered the Padawan Ahsoka Tano near Jabba the Hutt's palace with orders to kill the Hutt's kidnapped son, and she destroyed every one of them. IG-101 was cut apart by Obi-Wan Kenobi during the Battle of Coruscant. That pattern (frequently destroyed, never quite enough) is the point of the design: a MagnaGuard was meant to die buying its master seconds, and Grievous had a factory's worth of replacements. They were the closest the droid armies ever came to a true duelist, and against anyone short of a fully trained Jedi, that was usually plenty.

For a SWURPG player, the MagnaGuard is the melee-bruiser droid: a Droid Chassis body with +2 STR and +2 DEX, built around the Electrostaff Specialist and Tactical Bodyguard traits that turn it into a frontline defender for a more fragile ally. Acrobatics proficiency and the Photoreceptor Cloak trait lean into the cloaked-assassin flavor, letting it close distance and stay hard to pin down, while the brutal -2 CHA and -1 WIS keep it the silent, single-minded killer it was built to be (no negotiating, no second-guessing). The trade-off is Ion Sensitivity, the standard droid weakness: an ion blast or disruptor that an organic would shrug off can drop a MagnaGuard fast, so the player who builds one is signing up to be the squad's wall, not its diplomat.

MagnaGuard chassis run 1.95m tall — slightly taller than human, with a lean humanoid frame and dark green or grey plating partly draped in Kaleesh-pattern red cloth (the cloak covers the photoreceptor sockets in canonical configurations but does not obscure their vision). The signature weapon is the electrostaff: a polearm with active electrified tips on both ends, capable of parrying a lightsaber blade. The cranial unit has the photoreceptor cloak partly obscuring twin amber optics — when the cloak is removed, the face is an unsettling blank metallic mask with no expressive features whatsoever. Internal armor is moderate; the chassis was designed for agility and precision rather than blunt durability. Distributed-processor architecture means a MagnaGuard can continue fighting with its head destroyed, an unsettling tactical reality.