Ranat

Ranats are a meter-tall, tunnel-dwelling rodent species with protruding lower incisors and a long whiplike tail, native to Rydar II, nearly exterminated there, and known across the Outer Rim as scavengers and vermin — a description they reject, since in their own language they are the Con Queecon, the Conquerors.

The name is the first thing worth understanding about them. Ranat is what the Rydans called them. Con Queecon is what they call themselves, and a species of knee-high scavengers insisting on the title Conquerors is either delusion or defiance depending on how charitable the listener is feeling. Ranats are not confused about their size. They are, by most accounts, entirely sincere about their superiority.

Their history explains a good deal of that. Ranats evolved on Rydar II alongside a humanoid population, the Rydans, and the relationship deteriorated badly enough that around 200 BBY the local Human governor ordered the species exterminated. The purge was close to total. Three Ranats escaped by stowing away aboard a spice freighter, and the voyage ended the way such things do when the stowaways are predators and the crew is not — the ship came down on Aralia with no one alive to land it properly.

Those three founded everything that followed. They multiplied fast and drove warrens beneath Aralia's surface, and within a few generations the species was established on a world nobody had given them. When Imperial-era developers broke ground on Project Aralia, a vast amusement park intended to rescue the local economy, the Ranats responded by tunnelling out the ground beneath its support pylons and bringing attractions down. The Empire's answer was to classify them semi-sentient, round them up and train them as soldiers, a judgement the Ranats' subsequent conduct did very little to discourage.

Most of the galaxy's actual exposure to the species is one individual seen briefly and never named on screen: Reegesk, a Ranat drinking in the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine, who despite his species' origin on Rydar II came there from Aralia. Ranats have since turned up in roleplaying material going back to West End Games and, improbably, in LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures. (Assumption: much of the Rydar II and Aralia history above comes from Legends-era sources rather than current canon, and is flagged as such where it matters.)

As a player character, a Ranat is a small, fast, awkward problem for everyone around you. Dexterity and Stealth proficiency make you the one who gets into places, Darkvision means the dark is yours, and between claws and incisors you are never actually unarmed — a Ranat stripped of equipment in a cell can simply start chewing. The costs are real: you are weak, you are small, and the galaxy has decided what you are. Playing one well means deciding whether your Ranat accepts the galaxy's assessment or the Con Queecon's.

A Ranat stands roughly one meter tall on a thin, wiry frame, with a build closer to an upright rodent than to a humanoid. The head is dominated by heavy lower incisors that protrude well past the lip, growing continuously at a rate of about a centimetre per hour, which obliges a Ranat to gnaw more or less constantly simply to keep them manageable. Those teeth are strong enough to work through duracrete plating.

The hands end in prehensile claws evolved for digging through soft dirt and clay, and they grip as readily as they excavate. A long whiplike tail trails behind for balance. Fur is typically coarse and drab, which suits a species that spends most of its life underground.

Sensory equipment is built for the warren rather than the surface. Ranats perceive heat directly, which lets them navigate and hunt in tunnels with no light at all, and their sense of smell is correspondingly sharp. Daylight is tolerable but not preferred, and Ranat settlements are overwhelmingly subterranean mazes rather than surface structures.

Maturity arrives quickly — a Ranat is considered an adult at around three standard years — and the natural lifespan is short by galactic standards, in the region of twenty years. A species that reaches adulthood in three years and is finished in twenty moves through generations at a rate most of the galaxy finds difficult to plan around, which is part of how three stowaways became a population on Aralia inside a few decades.

The incisors deserve particular attention, because they are the species' defining tool and its defining nuisance. They are tusk-like and set in the lower jaw, projecting past the lip even with the mouth closed, and because they never stop growing a Ranat that cannot gnaw is a Ranat in trouble. The constant chewing that outsiders read as nervousness or bad manners is maintenance. It also means a Ranat is rarely without something in its hands to work on, and that a Ranat left alone in a room with the furniture will not leave the furniture as it found it.

Ranats consider themselves a superior species and have held that position through an extermination, an exile and a century of being treated as an infestation. The galaxy reads this as either comedy or pathology. From inside, it reads as the only thing that survived Rydar II.

They are territorial, acquisitive and quick to violence relative to their size, and they organise around the warren rather than the individual. Tunnelling is not merely how they live but how they solve problems — the response to Project Aralia was not protest or negotiation but digging out the ground under it, which is a fair summary of the Ranat approach to most obstacles. Patience, in a Ranat, usually means patience with a specific plan to undermine something.

The Rydar II collapse is worth being honest about, because the sources do not present it as a simple atrocity against innocents. The Rydans and the Ranats shared a world without understanding one another, Ranats preyed on Rydan settlements, and the governor's extermination order came after a long and ugly escalation rather than out of nowhere. That does not make an attempted genocide proportionate, and the Ranats who remember it do not grade it on a curve — but a species that calls itself the Conquerors did not arrive at the title by being harmless, and Ranat accounts of Rydar II tend to be less apologetic than a sympathetic outsider might expect.

The Imperial period left its own mark. Having been classified semi-sentient and conscripted off Aralia as soldiers, a generation of Ranats received military training from the people who had catalogued them as animals. Those who came back brought the training with them. It is not a coincidence that Ranat warrens are harder to clear now than they were before the Empire took an interest.

Outsiders get very little of this. To most beings a Ranat is a scavenger rummaging at the edge of a settlement, and the species' reputation as vermin is well established enough that it functions as a social fact regardless of any individual's conduct. Ranats are entirely aware of the reputation. A good number of them find it useful: a creature nobody considers a threat can stand very close to things that matter.

In a party, a Ranat is the infiltrator, the scout and the one who gets the restraints off. They fit naturally with scoundrels, slicers and salvage crews, and badly with anyone who needs the group to look respectable. The most interesting tension in playing one is the gap between how the table's NPCs see your character and how your character unambiguously sees themselves.