Neimoidian

Neimoidians are a tall, red-eyed humanoid species from the fungus-farmed world of Neimoidia, an offshoot of the spacefaring Duros infamous across the galaxy for their mercantile cunning, their bottomless greed, and the cowardice their rivals are only too happy to point out.

Descended from Duros colonists, Neimoidians share their ancestors' hairless heads and large eyes but little of their nerve. Their most fixed feature is those eyes — wide and red to pink, the pupils splitting the iris in a horizontal band that unsettles anyone who meets their gaze. Their skin, by contrast, is not fixed at all: across individuals it ranges from mottled grey to grey-green, blue-green, and in some — the tactician Mar Tuuk among them — a sickly yellow or beige, and it can deepen or shift over a lifetime, so that a Neimoidian may grey with the weight of power and green again with age. Bony ridges crease their sloped foreheads, their mouths are wide and thin-lipped, and their frames run tall and narrow — built for the counting-house and the negotiating table, not the battlefield.

Neimoidia lies deep in the Colonies, a humid world of fungus farms and hive-like cities that a Duros expedition under Chal Haan settled near the dawn of the Republic. Cut off and inbred over long millennia, those colonists drifted from their forebears into a separate people, and spread to a cluster of "purse worlds" — planets given over almost entirely to storing the wealth their trade empire accumulated. Everywhere they went, they built the same thing first: vaults.

What makes a Neimoidian is the grub. For their first seven years the young are kept as maggot-like larvae in communal hatcheries and deliberately underfed, left to compete over a food supply that will never stretch to all of them. The grubs that hoard, steal, and outlast their siblings survive; the rest starve. A Neimoidian carries that lesson for life. Greed is not a vice in their culture but a virtue — proof you were strong enough to live — and it makes them shrewd entrepreneurs, tireless administrators, and, to everyone who has been on the wrong end of a Neimoidian contract, treacherous cowards who will sell anyone to save themselves.

For a generation the face of the species was the Trade Federation, the merchant cartel whose battle-droid armies and blockade fleets let it bully whole systems over tariffs. Viceroy Nute Gunray led its invasion of Naboo, threw in with the Separatists, and rode his greed all the way to the Separatist Council and a bad end on Mustafar. But the Federation was never the whole story — Neimoidian senators, fleet officers, weapons-makers, and administrators turn up wherever there is money to move, count, or hide.

In SWURPG the Neimoidian makes a natural face and fixer, though nothing locks you into that role. Its +2 Intelligence and +1 Charisma lend themselves to a negotiator, appraiser, or schemer, backed by a trained head for galactic lore and markets — Slant the Deal rescues a botched bargain, Hoarder's Eye keeps you ahead on value, and Duros Heritage gives you an easy way with computers. With -2 Strength and a self-preservation streak, the species leans away from front-line fighting and toward winning encounters with the ledger rather than the blaster — but plenty of players build against type, and a Neimoidian with unexpected steel is a story in itself. If a smooth operator who always has an angle and an exit sounds like your kind of character, few species fit the part better.

Neimoidians are tall and slightly built, most standing between 1.8 and 2 meters yet rarely heavy, with long limbs and a slightly stooped, forward-leaning posture. Their skin is smooth and hairless, and it varies far more than outsiders expect — from mottled grey and grey-green to blue-green, and in some individuals a pale yellow or beige, often deepening or changing hue with age and rank. The head is the giveaway of their Duros ancestry: elongated and sloped, hairless, with a pair of bony ridges running up a high forehead and a wide, thin-lipped mouth below. Their eyes are their most disconcerting and most consistent feature — large, round, and red to pink, with pupils that split the eye in a narrow horizontal slit, giving them a flat, appraising stare that never seems to blink at quite the right moments.

Neimoidian dress is a language of its own. The mercantile aristocracy wraps itself in elaborate, heavy mantles, collars, and headdresses whose cut, color, and trim encode exact rank within the trade hierarchy; a senator or viceroy can barely move under the weight of their own status. Lower castes wear plainer tunics and work-smocks, but even a clerk keeps their collar correct. The overall impression is of a people for whom appearance, hierarchy, and the visible display of accumulated wealth are inseparable from identity.

To understand a Neimoidian, start with the ledger. They see the galaxy as a set of transactions — assets, liabilities, leverage, risk — and they are genuinely, formidably good at reading it. A Neimoidian negotiator finds the seam in a deal that everyone else missed, and a Neimoidian administrator can run a supply chain spanning a dozen systems without dropping a decimal. This is not a stupid people; it is a frightened, acquisitive, and very clever one.

The fear is real and cultural. Bred from the hatchery to put their own survival above all else, Neimoidians are risk-averse to the point of cowardice — quick to bluster when they hold the cards, and quicker to fold or flee when they do not. They prize hierarchy, obsess over status and its trappings, and trust almost no one; a Neimoidian assumes you are trying to cheat them because, in their world, you probably are. Loyalty exists, but it tends to be loyalty to an arrangement rather than a person.

All of which makes an adventuring Neimoidian an unusual and rewarding character to play. Cut loose from the safety of a trade hierarchy, they bring a sharp mind, a silver tongue, and a nose for value to a party that badly needs someone who can talk past a checkpoint, appraise a mysterious artifact, or turn a captured hold of cargo into credits. They are rarely the hero the galaxy expects — and a Neimoidian who discovers they have a spine after all is one of the more satisfying arcs a player can run.