Warrener
Humanoid (Beastfolk) -- Small -- Subsurface tunnel networks, ruin undercrofts, collapsed infrastructure corridors
We found them after the third collapse: a cluster of prints in the chalk dust, child-sized and too light, crossing the floor and vanishing at the wall. There was no door. The wall was solid stone. The prints just stopped. Keris went quiet after that, and on the third day she said she had been hearing tapping from below our camp since the first night, and she had not mentioned it because she thought it was the pipes.
-- survey notes, subsurface mapping party, secondary corridor, unnamed station
Ecology
Warreners are a small-frame Beastfolk lineage who live in tunnel systems of their own excavation and in the pre-Forgetting infrastructure that underlies most settled regions: maintenance shafts, drainage channels, collapsed transit corridors, and the layered ruin-warrens that accumulate beneath any site occupied long enough. They are not a single people so much as a category of related lineages who share a body plan and a set of adaptations, and who tend to reach similar cultural conclusions independently: information is the primary trade good, darkness is an asset, and speed matters more than mass.
The Warrener frame is compact and dense, with large eyes adapted for low-light conditions and an inner-ear structure that works as a pressure sensor in tight tunnels. Their hands are dexterous in a way that reads as nervous to surface observers -- the fingers in constant small motion, tapping surfaces, cataloguing texture. This is not agitation; it is reading. A Warrener navigating an unfamiliar tunnel is conducting a continuous tactile survey, and the information it accumulates in a few minutes of contact would take a surface explorer days to replicate by other means.
Their social structure is organized around tunnel-right: who owns access to which passages, who has excavated which extensions, and what the current rate is for transit, information, and emergency egress. These rights are not abstract; they are enforced. A party that moves through Warrener tunnels without arranging terms first has not avoided a negotiation -- they have simply entered one at a significant disadvantage.
Warreners fight by disruption and misdirection rather than sustained engagement. The Scout is the reconnaissance element: fast, lightly armed, almost impossible to follow through its own tunnel network. The Warder is the line fighter, competent with blade and bow at close quarters, and practiced at the redirect -- pulling an attacker's strike toward a nearby ally in a deliberate sacrifice that creates an opening. Neither variant is designed to win a stand-up fight. The goal is to make the cost of engagement high enough that the surface party decides the tunnel isn't worth the trouble.
Warrener Scout
| AC | HP | Speed | Initiative |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 7 (2d6) | 30 ft. | +2 (12) |
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 (-1) | 15 (+2) | 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) | 8 (-1) | 8 (-1) |
Skills Stealth +6
Gear Daggers (3)
Senses Darkvision 60 ft.; Passive Perception 9
Languages Common, Warrener cant
CR 1/8 (XP 25; PB +2)
Melee or Ranged Attack Roll: +4, reach 5 ft. or range 20/60 ft. Hit: 4 (1d4 + 2) Piercing damage.
The Warrener Scout takes the Disengage or Hide action.
Dagger
Nimble Escape
Warrener Warder
| AC | HP | Speed | Initiative |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 10 (3d6) | 30 ft. | +2 (12) |
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 (-1) | 15 (+2) | 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) | 8 (-1) | 8 (-1) |
Skills Stealth +6
Gear Leather Armor, Short Blade, Shield, Short Bow
Senses Darkvision 60 ft.; Passive Perception 9
Languages Common, Warrener cant
CR 1/4 (XP 50; PB +2)
Melee Attack Roll: +4, reach 5 ft. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) Slashing damage, plus 2 (1d4) Slashing damage if the attack roll had Advantage.
Ranged Attack Roll: +4, range 80/320 ft. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) Piercing damage, plus 2 (1d4) Piercing damage if the attack roll had Advantage.
The Warrener Warder takes the Disengage or Hide action.
Trigger: A creature the Warrener Warder can see makes an attack roll against it. Response: The Warder chooses a Small or Medium ally within 5 feet of itself. The Warder and that ally swap places, and the ally becomes the target of the attack instead.
Short Blade
Short Bow
Nimble Escape
Redirect
Encounter use
Warreners are most effective when the party is moving through Warrener-controlled tunnels without prior arrangement -- which is almost any time the party descends into subsurface ruin structures without making contact first. Open the encounter with the party already observed: the Warreners have known the party was coming since they crossed the tunnel threshold. Scouts appear, assess, and vanish; the party may never see them. Warders engage only when cornered or when defending a specific point -- a junction, a water source, a supply cache. The Redirect reaction is the signature behavior: a Warder will deliberately accept exposure to redirect an attack toward a packmate who can absorb it, then use Nimble Escape to disappear into the tunnel on the next action. Parties that have never encountered this tactic often spend a round confused about what just happened.
Salvage
Warreners carry nothing of great material value, but their knowledge is another matter. A living Warrener who is willing to negotiate is worth considerably more than a dead one: tunnel maps, access codes to sealed infrastructure sections, and information about what the tunnels connect to are all commodities with real value in the surface economy. A Warrener in good faith negotiation is forthcoming about routes it has already sold to other parties; it keeps proprietary information separate. Finding out what it is keeping proprietary is often more useful than anything it volunteers.