Oortling

An oortling looks like a short, stocky dwarf with deathly pale skin and a bloated skull. Inside is an overgrown brain capable of real brilliance, if its owner were ever allowed to learn. Instead, an oortling brain's brightest prospect is ending up as the centerpiece of a mind reaver feast.

Their masters have bred out every scrap of fighting instinct, and oortlings cringe at the faintest threat of violence. Only when crazed by pain or out of their minds have they been seen to bite and scratch, a feeble attack that still deals 1d2.

They live on comets, the drifting mountains of ice and iron inside the crystal shells, tunneling through the frozen crust toward the stone or iron core. Each comet hosts 4d6x10, half of them females and young.

Once their culture could build palaces of comet ice. Then starfaring mind reavers seized them early in their history, and no amount of sophistication could have broken that mental and physical grip. Now reduced to primitive tribes, they are livestock, their curiosity and creativity crushed, tended by reaver 'farmers' and hauled off whenever their masters grow hungry.

Oortlings eat comet ice. Their bodies digest it, extracting nutrients and filtering out toxins deadly to other humanoids, but only cometary ice has what they need; ordinary frozen water does nothing for them.

Apart from the reavers who breed them like cattle, other races find little of value in them, though some cultures have learned that the fluid cushioning an oortling's brain is a fine ingredient for potions involving telepathy and other mental powers.