Toong

Toong are a bipedal species from the Outer Rim world of Tund, known for their bulbous neckless bodies, the enormous wide-set eyes that sit high on their skulls, and a comet strike that turned an entire species into refugees inside a single generation.

A Toong's build reads as a joke until you watch one work. The body is round and heavy through the middle, the limbs run long and thin out of all proportion to it, and there is no neck whatsoever. The head sits flush on the shoulders, so a Toong who wants to look behind itself turns its entire torso to do it. The eyes more than compensate. They sit high on the skull and far apart, with pupils oversized even for their sockets, and between them they take in close to the full circle of the horizon at once. The cheeks hang in loose jowls that distend when filled, which means a Toong crossing open country carries several days of food and water in its own face. Adults stand anywhere from 1.6 to 2.4 meters, a spread wide enough that two Toong of the same age can differ by most of a meter.

The species did not begin on Tund. Their original homeworld was Toong'L, and shortly before 32 BBY it was struck by comets and rendered uninhabitable. The survivors crossed to the neighbouring world of Tund and stayed, which makes Tund an adopted homeworld rather than an ancestral one — a distinction Toong themselves are said to maintain carefully. (In Legends, the comet account comes from roleplaying sources rather than a film or novel; Wookieepedia's own entry simply names Tund as the Toong homeworld.)

Tund was a strange place to inherit. It is a rocky, jungle-choked world hidden away in the Tund system, in the Centrality sector of the Outer Rim at grid square U-8, and long before any Toong arrived it was held by the ancient Sith Empire as a Force nexus. The Sorcerers of Tund, an occult order of Force practitioners, were founded on that same ground. A species of nervous refugees settling a world with that history is one of the odder accidents in the sector, and most Toong have no interest at all in the ruins they live among.

Temperamentally, Toong are described as anxious and reserved, inclined to keep to their own settlements, and prone to agoraphobia — an unfortunate trait in a people whose eyes are built for open horizons. The best-known Toong off-world is Ben Quadinaros, a podracer who was already famous at home before he entered the Boonta Eve Classic on Tatooine. He is remembered by everyone else for how that went: his four engines failed to couple at the start, and the racer tore itself apart on the grid before he had travelled a meter. It is a thin basis on which to judge a species, and Toong who travel tend to know it.

As a player character, a Toong is a watcher. The eyes and the Wisdom bonus make you the one who notices, and the Panoramic Eyes trait means a fight never goes behind you — no enemy pair ever earns the flanking bonus against you, which quietly changes how your party can afford to stand. Toongese Tongue reflects a mouth built for a harder language than Basic. The costs are honest ones: a heavy body on spindly legs gives Disadvantage on Acrobatics and a Strength penalty, so Toong make poor tumblers and worse grapplers. Play one as the scout who holds the doorway and sees the ambush coming.

The Toong silhouette is unmistakable and almost entirely wrong by humanoid standards. A rounded, heavy torso sits on two long and strikingly thin legs, with arms of similar proportion hanging from narrow shoulders. There is no neck. The head is fixed directly atop the body, which forces the whole torso to rotate whenever a Toong looks to the side or behind.

Compensating for that rigidity is a set of eyes positioned high on the skull and set unusually far apart, with pupils large relative to the eye itself. The arrangement sacrifices some depth perception in exchange for an extremely wide field of view, and gathers enough light that gloom troubles a Toong less than it troubles most humanoids. Below them, the cheeks form expandable jowls — a Toong can pack them with food and water and draw on the reserve for days, which is why they look fullest at the start of a journey and gaunt at the end.

Skin tones run through green, blue and deep purple, often mottled rather than uniform. Height varies enormously: 1.6 meters is unremarkable and so is 2.4, with Ben Quadinaros recorded at 1.63 meters, toward the short end of his species. Build stays consistently bulbous regardless of height, so a tall Toong reads as elongated rather than lean.

Toong are, by most accounts, a nervous people. Sources describe them as anti-social and prone to agoraphobia, keeping to their own settlements and to enclosed, defensible spaces rather than open ground. There is an irony in that: a species whose eyes evolved to sweep an entire horizon largely prefers not to look at one. Whether this is ancestral or a mark left by the loss of Toong'L is not something the sources settle, though Toong who discuss it at all tend toward the second explanation.

Within their own communities they are reportedly far warmer than outsiders ever see, and the reticence that reads as unfriendliness to a stranger is closer to caution. A Toong meeting someone new will often spend a long time simply watching before saying anything, which non-Toong routinely misread as rudeness or slowness. It is neither. A species that notices everything tends to want the full picture before committing to a position.

The diaspora shapes the rest. Toong culture has been continuously aware, for roughly a century, that a homeworld can be taken away without warning and without malice. That produces a practical, provisioning sort of outlook — the jowls are biology, but the habit of never travelling without reserves is cultural — and a wariness about putting down roots that a Toong cannot pick up again.

Toong who leave Tund are self-selected for nerve, since leaving means crossing exactly the open spaces the species avoids. They make excellent scouts, lookouts and navigators, and they turn up as mechanics and pilots more often than their reputation suggests. The reputation is the problem: thanks to one spectacular failure on a Tatooine starting grid, a great many beings in the galaxy think they already know what a Toong is.