Neti

The Neti are among the most ancient and enigmatic peoples in the galaxy — sentient plants that evolved from the towering trees of the forest world Myrkr, then carried their seeds outward to the Mid Rim colony world of Ryyk. They are sometimes called Ryyk after that world, though Myrkr is generally held to be their true cradle. A supernova consumed Ryyk roughly four thousand years before the Battle of Yavin, in the era of the Great Sith War, and the Neti who survived did so the way Neti survive most things: slowly, patiently, and mostly unnoticed. By later ages the species had passed almost entirely into myth.

Neti measure their lives in millennia. An individual may live several thousand years, and the species reproduces only once every few centuries — a handful of seeds that can lie dormant for over a thousand years before they germinate. Because they breed so rarely and live so long, the Neti have never been numerous, and they have never strayed far from where they were planted. A Neti does not think in seasons or reigns; it thinks in epochs, and that long view colors everything about how the species moves through the galaxy.

Every Neti is born sensitive to the Force, and the most famous of them were Jedi. Ood Bnar served as head librarian of the great Jedi Library on Ossus, a keeper of galactic history so patient he once spent millennia rooted in tree-form to guard a cache of lightsabers from the Sith. The Jedi Master T'ra Saa walked the galaxy across centuries of upheaval; the Master Garnoo and the Sith librarian Dail'Liss show that the species' deep memory could serve either side of the Force. According to the Qel-Droma Epics, the Neti Master T'alla raised a garden inside the Ossus library and then planted herself at its center, becoming a tree — a fittingly Neti way to retire.

Neti survive by photosynthesis. They need light far more than they need food, and only a fraction of the water other species require. A Neti schooled in the Force can sink into a dormant trance and outlast centuries of darkness or drought, waking when the galaxy has changed around it. This is why the Neti are never quite gone: somewhere, in some overgrown ruin or forgotten forest, a Neti is almost certainly still standing, waiting to be discovered.

For a player, a Neti is a character with one foot in deep time. They make natural Jedi Consulars, Force Mystics, and Force Adepts — the Force has been part of them since germination — and their patience and accumulated lore also suit Scouts, scholars, and any role built on knowing more than everyone else at the table. A Neti adventurer is, almost by definition, a young one: barely a few centuries old, curious enough about the wider galaxy to leave the grove and see it for themselves.

A Neti has tough gray skin like plant bark, a thick trunk-like body, and several thin, branching arms. Brown or black foliage grows across the upper part of the body, and a crown of black-green vegetable "fur" resembles a head of hair. Root-like appendages serve as feet. At rest, an adult Neti commonly settles into the shape of a five-meter tree, and can hold that shape — or any other — even while asleep or unconscious.

The Neti's defining trait is metamorphosis: a skilled individual can reshape its size and form at will, from a slender, roughly humanoid build to a squat quadrupedal stance to a solid, treelike mass anywhere from two to nine and a half meters tall. Even in its most tree-like forms a Neti keeps manipulative tendrils for handling tools and making attacks. The change is deliberate and unhurried — a Neti shifts shape the way it does everything else: with patience.

Neti are deep thinkers and natural explorers, drawn to the unsolved — the mysteries of the Force, the histories of fallen worlds, the questions other species are too short-lived to sit with. They form bonds slowly but firmly, and they bond fastest with those who share their curiosity. A Neti rarely rushes, rarely panics, and rarely forgets; centuries of memory give them a steadiness that can read as wisdom or as maddening detachment, depending on who is waiting on them.

At the table, a Neti brings the long view: the character who remembers the war everyone else only read about, who counsels patience, who treats a setback as a season rather than a disaster. That perspective makes them compelling sages and advisors — and it makes the rare moment a Neti is genuinely surprised or moved land all the harder.