Ruve

A ruve looks like a wild dog or war dog, sandy brown to glossy black, with unusually alert eyes. Often they play ordinary hounds while sizing up strangers, revealing their true nature mainly to groups that seem mostly good. Courteous and disciplined, they follow spoken Common though they cannot speak it.

Biting strikes ruve as uncouth, so they fight with psionics, working in trained packs that use elaborate tactics to herd foes into bad positions. Their telepathic sciences are probe and mind link, backed by the devotions contact, truthear, send thoughts, mental barrier, conceal thoughts, and invisibility. In psychokinesis they know the sciences detonate and telekinesis and the devotions control flames, control body, and animate object. Psychoportation gives them probability travel as a science and time/space anchor as a devotion.

They are brave and hard to intimidate, but not bloodthirsty, usually happy to knock out or chase off an enemy. Against a foe they recognize as evil, they fight to kill.

No one knows where the ruve homeworld lies, though packs have spread across many worlds and planes, adapting their temperament to each. They like warm, dry caves, and both sexes are equally able fighters. Each year a mated pair whelps 2d4 pups of 2+2 Hit Dice that have only the telepathy discipline and its powers and grow up within a year.

Their rich culture includes psychokinetic art and haunting howled compositions, but it has also made them snobs. They sneer at blink dogs and the starlit hounds of the void as country bumpkins and consider ordinary dogs beneath insult. A human or demihuman mind duller than a ruve's will hear about it endlessly. The most insufferable packs wander several prime worlds and the void between them, boasting of a barren desert homeland short on metal, tales most listeners dismiss. They pester adventurers with telepathic trivia at any moment and drop in unannounced on sages and powerful mages in search of obscure knowledge.

Ruve keep evil psionic monsters in check and are natural foes of intellect devourers, mind reavers, su monsters, and thought eaters; against these, snobbery vanishes into instinctive, savage hatred. They never get fleas, but each ruve encountered has a 35% chance of carrying 1d4 cerebral parasites. Paladins value them as faithful companions, as do clerics and psionicists of lawful good alignment; nobody else has the patience for their intellectual airs.