2HD Guys
I think 2HD is the sweet spot for Guy-type monsters. At 1HD you're basically just a human or elf or whatever. At 3HD you're something a bit weightier, more substantial, above baseline humanity. 2HD hits that balance of being palpably apart from "normal people" without being too far beyond them. Gnolls, lizardfolk, ghouls, they're all on that precipice. You can have the party blunder into a village of them and it's unusual and alien in some key ways, but it's not, like, a monster settlement first and foremost.
Does any of that make sense? Probably not. Here are some 2HD Guys.
Kylics
"Kylic" is only part of the name they use for themselves. The whole thing is impossible to transcribe with letters alone. Humans call them "clickers".
Physiology
Kylics are spindly four-armed humanoids, averaging 8' tall, found mostly in the kinds of deep, smouldering bogs that nobody bothers trying to claim or contest. Their furrowed bone-white exoskeletons cover wormlike bodies beneath, and are much more flexible than they look. These carapaces are brittle and crack often, but their blood is a natural bonding agent for the chitin, and old or adventurous kylics have thin orange "mould lines" crisscrossing their limbs and shoulders like kintsugi.
Kylic faceplates are flat and shield-shaped, with five beady orange eyes forming a circle around a rubbery toothless maw, covered by a sliding "lid" of chitin. They're herbivorous, living mostly on grasses and fruit, but they hunt and herd animals for bone, tallow, and other materials. Without lips or tongues, their vocalisations are very limited, so their spoken language combines modulations of pitch and rhythm, clicks of their mouth-lids, and rapid, jittery gestures with their smaller secondary arms.
The kylics most adventurers encounter are all female. Male kylics are wagon-sized, nearly immobile, and subsapient, and females don't really recognise them as the same type of being as themselves.
Society
There are two basic things to understand about the way kylics think. The first is that they don't fear pain. They feel it, and understand that severe damage can disable or kill them, but a missing limb or gaping chest wound doesn't instinctively bother them any more than a hairline crack in the carapace.
The second is that kylics are obsessed with humiliation. Not in a villainous or kinky way. It's purer than that, more platonic, and it doesn't matter if it's happening to them or anyone else. They're captivated by failure, hurt, and embarrassment, in the same way you or I might be captivated by a stunning vista or a beautiful song. They would be awestruck by Punch and Judy, the Three Stooges, or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Show them Jackass and they might start a religion around it.
These two factors have doubtless contributed to the kylics' unexpectedly advanced technology. Every kylic has the same disregard for comfort and safety, theirs and their peers', as the very maddest of human mad scientists, and they have ready access to peat, clay, and volatile bog gases. They ply deeper waters in screw-propeller barges with primitive firebox engines, and their homes are lit and warmed by metered gas burners. If the swamp miasma seems thicker and grimier and smells more sulfurous than usual, a kylic village may be nearby.
Stats
KYLIC
HD 2, Df leather, Mv normal, wade normal, Mr 8, Atk gig spear (1d8+1) or gas caliver.
#App roving patrols of 1d3+1, villages of 6d6 plus 1d3 males (HD 5, no movement or attacks).
- Wade: Kylics can wade through water up to 6' high at normal speed.
- Gas Caliver: Each kylic has a 2-in-6 chance to carry a gas caliver. It's a 2' long clay tube attached to a metal ignition assembly and loaded with a sealed jar of flammable gas. 2d6 fire damage in a 30' cone, Save for half, and the kylic takes 1d6-2 damage. One shot per fight - the jar and tube must both be replaced before firing again.
Gnetti
With a hard G, "guh-netti". Singular "gnetto".
Physiology
Gnetti resemble ambulatory mudskippers, about as tall as a human and twice as wide, with thick, stumpy limbs and telescopic eye-crests. Their skin is bluish-white and translucent, but it's usually buried beneath a layer of bubbling charcoal-grey sludge, gritty with limescale like the dregs of an ancient kettle. They're wreathed in a constant miasma of murky vapour, and stink of ammonia and hot tar.
Gnetti have a curious affliction: they cannot metabolise liquid water. They can swallow it, but it flushes itself instantly into their muddy cladding. They can only hydrate themselves properly by inhaling water vapour. Fortunately, they have near-perfect control of their body temperature and can superheat their appendages to well past boiling point, greedily funnelling the resultant plumes of steam into their huge overbites.
They also use this ability to cook on carefully selected slates. Gnetti are gleefully omnivorous, and, if you can get past the smell, some of the finest sauciers and poissonniers in the known world.
Society
Gnetti live in modest mud-brick villages on the coast, with no formal leadership and no real laws beyond "be decent". These are tied together in larger linear clusters which the gnetti call "fronts". The villages may be separated by miles and their people mingle only rarely, but they are bound by shared ancestry, and by a shared enemy: the sea.
The gnetti don't carry out their grand campaign against the sea with any great zeal or urgency. It's a casual war of attrition, something to pick up and set aside as circumstances permit. The supposed battle plan varies a bit from front to front, but usually culminates in the gnetti becoming numerous and strong enough to boil away the sea entirely and reclaim the ancient empire it stole from them. (They are willfully ignorant of the water cycle, and discount any attempt to explain it to them as marinist propaganda.)
Besides that, they're honestly pretty inoffensive. Gnetti live a slow life. Their society and technology haven't budged an inch for hundreds of years, and they see no particular reason to change what works. They have no written language, but are very fond of epic poetry. Gnetti are rather sluggish and melancholy by nature, and can easily while away hours picking at a meal, kneading mud and clay into an abstract sculpture, or simply staring out at the horizon. Anthropologists have suggested that their hydrophobic crusade may be less about uncovering some lost empire, and more about giving them a sense of camaraderie and a reason to get up and act.
Stats
GNETTO
HD 2, Df unarmoured, Mv normal, swim half normal, Mr 7, Atk burning slam (2d4).
#App lone wanderers, posses of 2d3, villages of 8d6.
- Immune to mundane fire.
- Burning Slam: If relevant, the high die is physical damage and the low die is heat damage.
- Sludge: A gnetto's dense, sticky second skin has a 2-in-6 chance to absorb any human-scale attack harmlessly, including hostile single-target spells. This coating can be washed off with water or solvents, and takes 1 minute and plenty of water to restore.
Stakers
Yes, they call themselves that.
Physiology
Stakers are lumpen, hunchbacked humanoids, averaging 6' tall, with plantigrade legs and huge bowed arms. Their bodies are oddly powdery to the touch, like chalk or plaster, and their naturally grey-white skin is covered in dark bruises and stains. Their knobbly ursine faces, especially, are prone to such blemishes, as stakers are obligate carnivores and very messy eaters. They wear robes of coarse black linen, open at the back and tied around the waist like hospital gowns.
A thick hump of meat and bone hangs heavily from a staker's back. The lower part of this hump contains many of their vital organs, including one of their two hearts, and is the source of their namesake stakes: a thicket of bone spines, averaging 18" in length, that protrude from the top like arrows in a quiver. These spines are only loosely bound to the flesh and can be pulled free with trivial effort. They are dagger-sharp, but the true danger is in the sticky grey ichor that coats them. All stakers carry greyphage, a bloodborne disease (to which they are immune) that sterilises all it touches, stunting growth and healing.
Society
Nomadic and extremely hardy, stakers can survive almost anywhere, but are drawn especially to overgrown, blighted, or ecologically imbalanced areas. This, they claim, is their duty: the curbing of nature's excesses. They are chemotherapists of the earth, druids of a sort, though they hate and persecute conventional druids (and the feeling is very much mutual). Travellers in a land ravaged by rot or invasive growth might come across a bare, sterile clearing demarcated by stakes driven into the earth.
Stakers attribute their mandate to an antediluvian authority they call Vacans. They speak of him less as a deity and more as an absentee manager, and don't seem particularly fond of him, but treat all other gods and faiths with reactionary scorn. They treat most other people much the same way, but are rarely violent unless they're provoked or have identified their peers as somehow "part of the problem".
Given their zeal, stakers are often thought to be mindless drones, but they're perfectly free-willed; they just tend towards listlessness and anhedonia. The leader of a family group, or mission, isn't the oldest or strongest member, but the most motivated. A mission can easily drift for months or years without a clear goal beyond survival (easy enough - they have slow metabolisms and no natural predators), but, once they're on task, stakers can be incredibly dogged, in a "3:30pm on a Friday and just one more TPS report to finish" sort of way.
Stats
STAKER
HD 2, Df leather, Mv normal, Mr 7, Atk stake (1d6 plus greyphage).
#App missions of 1d6+2.
- Greyphage: Save or reduce your maximum hit points (or Constitution score, or whatever you subtract damage from) by half the damage taken. Can be cured as a disease.