Crawler

Crawlers are long aliens with many short limbs. Their main body is extremely flexible. They like different working conditions than humans, and so they are much more likely to meet virtually than actually. While they have been described as looking like centipedes, they have large reptilian scales on their main body and their claws are bony rather than chitinous. Their internal skeleton is quite strong. The great exception to their otherwise quite vertebrate build are their four mandibles, which they use in conjunction with a mass of feelers under their head to manipulate objects.
Crawlers are about 15 feet long, including their forked tail. They weight more than a human, though not much, and have a scaly exterior. They do their heavy lifting with the massive mandibles, and their delicate work with the mass of feelers just under. Their 'legs' are hardly even legs at all, but rather bony four inch protrusions mounted on a flexible base on the main body. The legs align in sets of three on a side, clumped close together. As you go down the long body, the legs become stouter and shorter.

Crawlers are completely blind, and their senses of smell and hearing are no better than a humans, though they are very sensitive to some chemicals. Their sense of touch is fantastic: they can navigate using vibrations in the ground, and use thumps of their tail to communicate. They process this information much as sound, but at a very low frequency. The senses of touch uses hairs sticking out from the scales, and massive burn damage on the body will damage their tactile senses.

Crawlers do not like the open air. They evolved in loose dirt and many of their early predators where winged, swooping down on unsuspecting Crawlers. They still prefer to live in loose, sandy environments rather than the open air that many other species enjoy, and are thus known for being recluses. They have vivid imaginations and handle abstract ideas very well.

Crawler tools are manipulated in their mouths, and tend to be small and thin. They're technology has long centered on building and agriculture rather than hunting. They eliminated the predators of their home world through trapping, not hunting, and their agriculture is centered around tubers.

Crawlers are designed for a very different environment than humans. A crawler in a fight in a human room is in pretty bad shape, because he's blind. But then again, a human in a crawler's tunnel is in cramped quarters, struggling with a flashlight, and possibly struggling with the oxygen supply.

Template [-5]:

Blind [-50], Vibration Sense [10], Sensitive Touch [10], 1 Short Arm [-5], subsonic speech [0], subsonic hearing [5], No Legs (slithers) [0], Versatile [5], Doesn't Breathe (breathe holding x25)[10], accessory (digs without shovel)[1], quirk (uncomfortable under sky)[-1]


The short arm advantage reflects that all of a crawler's manipulators are mounted close together, on the head -- fine manipulation at two places far away from each other is difficult. This is NOT one-arm: crawlers are just as good at climbing, wrestling, and a host of other activities as humans. What they lack is the ability to use two items in melee combat.

Breath holding reflects the ability of the creature to function on less oxygen than a human or other typical alien would need. Its intended to allow an oxygen breathing creature to survive in sandy, often oxygen-poor tunnels.

quirk (uncomfortable under sky) was included rather than a phobia because it was both rational for them and giving an entire species a phobia is a bit extreme.

Crawlers in the campaign

A society with crawlers in it will see some division of labor around fairly racial lines. Jobs that involve dark tunnels will often go to crawlers. Mines, sewage tunnels, and similar environments are if not comfortable at least familiar to the burrowing species, and they handle underwater jobs better than many surface dwellers -- though not like aquatic species. They can even share neighborhoods with sky dwellers without much competition for living space. Crawlers are good at incorporating into other species' economies, and at incorporating others. 

Crawlers doing white collar work rather than blue-collar will face some challenges if living among others: they rely heavily on their sense of touch, but are blind, meaning that different technologies are needed to display information to them. If they are discovered by a civilization farther along, such technology may lag far behind visual data displays. Conversely, if they are the advanced civilization, visual displays may lag behind and crawlers will do all the white collar work.

Crawler military operations are as odd as the rest of their interactions. They are nearly helpless against ranged weapons. Of course, they're normally under the ground, which means ranged weapons are usually irrelevant. With high tech gear their inability to see is negated in ship to ship combat, and at close quarters they can often detect foes around corners much better than the opposition.

Crawlers can make fine PC's, if the player is up to the challenge of embracing the character's alien world. They are challenging to play though, and they can't fill all the roles a human can -- but they can fill some rolls much better than a human.