Star Wars: Aliens, Rachni

Rachni

Attribute Dice: 

DEXTERITY: 

KNOWLEDGE: 

MECHANICAL: 

PERCEPTION: 

STRENGTH: 

TECHNICAL: 

Special Abilities:

Survival: The rachni can breath any atmosphere, except vacuum, without breathing devices. They are extremely resistant to radiation and toxins (+5d to resist radiation exposure or poisons of any kind).
Hive Mind: Most rachni are marginally sentient and do as the rachni queen's demand. The stats here are for soldiers who enjoy sentience, but must abide by the will of the queen. 

Story Factors: 

Territorial: The rachni tolerate no infringement on their worlds. 

Move: 

Size:  to  meters

The rachni are a believed-extinct race of intelligent insectoids that threatened to defeat and overthrow the Old Republic races roughly two thousand years ago.

Rachni workers are the smallest type of rachni. They appear as small green creatures and their main attack is a suicide explosion that releases toxic damage over a wide radius. Rachni soldiers are slower, but much larger creatures than Rachni Workers, with thin tentacles ending in little pods. Soldiers are the main defenders of rachni held areas and can cause toxic damage with their spit. Rachni brood warriors are rachni who are much larger and stronger than normal Rachni Soldiers. They are male gendered rachni and they have some Force ability. Rachni Queens are the largest and most intelligent of the rachni.

Javik mentions the Protheans "uplifted" the Rachni (who were just animals in their cycle), turning them loose as living weapons; the Protheans burned two hundred planets when the Rachni inevitably went out of control, and were under the impression the Rachni were extinct.

The rachni, a species of spacefaring insects guided by a hive-mind intelligence, evolved on Suen, a planet tidally-locked to its red dwarf star. Life developed in a habitable terminator zone between hemispheres that were constantly scorched or perpetually frozen. The harsh conditions of Suen's surface forced the rachni to forage underground amid sprawling subterranean river systems. Sometime at the height of the Prothean Empire, the Protheans discovered the rachni and bred them as weapons of war, selecting for the most cunning and warlike queens and unleashing rachni swarms on their enemies. Eventually, the rachni became too difficult to control and turned on their Prothean masters. The Protheans attempted to eradicate the rachni and destroyed as many as 200 worlds before they were satisfied the rachni were extinct, but enough survived on Suen to replenish their population. As the rachni developed civilization, they established surface cities on Suen. Wrestling with the engineering problems of Suen's extreme surface environment may have given the rachni their first insights into how to build interstellar spacecraft. After achieving spaceflight, the rachni first traveled to the neighboring planet of Kashshaptu and discovered a crater there known as "the howling gulf", which featured an abundance of element zero. The rachni obtained samples of the eezo and studiously researched its properties, but would not develop FTL technology until centuries later.

They were first encountered by accident. The extremely xenophobic rachni, angered by the encroachment of what it believed were inferior species upon its living space, counter-attacked, determined to destroy the perceived invaders. The rachni used their extensive research on element zero to reverse-engineer the FTL drives of the explorers' starships. They proceeded to construct FTL vessels of their own and rapidly expanded into the galaxy, ushering in the Rachni Wars. Negotiation was impossible with the rachni queens, who could not be contacted in their underground lairs on the toxic rachni worlds. It was assumed that the rachni were irredeemably hostile and could only be stopped through warfare, but the rachni had the upper hand and overwhelmed defenses with their sheer numbers. Eventually the krogan, discovered and elevated to civilization by the salarians due to their fighting prowess, hardiness, and high birth rate, were able to push back and eventually exterminate the rachni. With the conclusion of the Rachni Wars, the Republic declared the rachni to be extinct; although in caution the Republic left a listening post in the system to monitor for any survivors.

More recently, rachni eggs had been found by a science team on a derelict ship and brought to the Peak 15 research labs on Noveria, where lax research regulations permitted a significant and dangerous amount of research and experimentation; the rachni were effectively brought back from extinction for the purpose of serving as weapons of war sold to the highest bidder.

The rachni are territorial, determined to remain isolated from the rest of the galaxy. They normally inhabit extremely hazardous worlds, able to survive environments that kill most sentient species. Should their territory be invaded on purpose or even by accident, they respond with brutal force. However, many make the mistake of underestimating the rachni as mindless animals when in fact the rachni are an extremely intelligent sentient species. The rachni achieved space flight and a form of cryogenic suspension, developed weapons and carved out a huge swathe of galactic territory. Far from treating soldiers as disposable resources of the hive - rachni soldiers are carefully nurtured as part of the group.

The queens are the leaders of the rachni hive mind and provide guidance for the rest of their species. Their ways of perception, thinking and communications seem to be different from that of other races, and based upon a synesthesian perception of sound as both sound and color, and geared towards frequencies beyond normal sonic range, as well as a telepathic hivemind. They regard speech and thought as form of music, as shown by the strange metaphors used when attempting to communicate, for example, "songs the color of oily shadow". The speech patterns used by them in such occasions are also unusual; "When we speak, one moves all". They refer to their manner of communication as "singing", which soothes and nurtures their young, and this appears to colour their entire psychology - for example, the rachni speak of death as "the great silence", and refer to their homeworld as the "singing planet". The rachni ability to genetically share knowledge across generations makes queens a vast repository of information.