A clangit absolutely knows what it’s doing: it fights like a vindictive station engineer with fey instincts, using map control and infrastructure as its real weapon instead of its bite.
What Clangits Want
Clangits are explicitly “space station gremlins” who know everything about the inner workings of their home stations and enjoy punishing larger inhabitants who understand them less. Their goals in a fight are:
Protect and show off “their” station.
Make tallfolk look foolish or clumsy.
Survive to keep playing pranks tomorrow.
Given their Tiny size, modest HP, and simple attacks, they don’t want to stand in the open and trade blows. They want the station itself to do the heavy lifting.
Core Tools and What They Imply
Speed 20 ft, fly 20 ft: 3D mobility in shafts, open bays, and zero‑g spaces; they can hover at awkward angles or just out of weapon reach.
Intelligence +3: They’re smart; treat them as puzzle‑solvers, not animals.
Mechanical Trickery (1 action): After 1 hour exploring a station, they gain an intuitive map of its infrastructure and can remotely control things like doors, airlocks, heat vents, alarms, lights, and gravity controls within 60 feet.
Tech Travel (2 actions, teleportation): They can enter a nearby panel/pipe and pop out of another piece of mechanical infrastructure within 100 feet.
Low‑level fey chassis: AC 14, HP 8, Ref +8, Will +6, cold/electric resist 1, weak to cold iron and fire.
All of that screams: hit‑and‑run saboteur and battlefield controller that lives in the walls.
Battlefield Preferences
A savvy clangit chooses or shapes ground that favors:
Dense infrastructure: corridors with lots of doors, airlocks, ladders, cranes, cargo rails, vents, grav plates, alarms, sprinklers.
Vertical or zero‑g spaces: so its fly Speed and Tech Travel matter more than the PCs’ walking Speed.
Multiple adjacent rooms: to maximize the impact of slamming doors, sudden decompressions, or redirected crowds.
If the environment doesn’t have toys to play with (bare rock, wilderness, featureless ship hull), a clangit will avoid engagement or work to lure enemies toward more complex parts of the station first.
“Turn the Station On”
On round one, a clangit’s priority is to activate the map, not land damage.
Assuming it’s already spent the required hour mapping the station (which it almost always has on its home turf):
Start Hidden: It begins in ducts, behind a panel, or inside a junction box, using size and flight to stay out of line of sight.
Mechanical Trickery first: Slam or lock a door behind the PCs. Kill or strobe the lights in one zone. Toggle gravity in a small area. Open a heat vent or alarm at an inconvenient moment.
Only then show itself briefly: Pop out just long enough to fire an unstable spark or cackle from a safe perch. Immediately use move/fly or Tech Travel next round to vanish again.
The clangit’s goal is to signal “you are in my territory; your assumptions about how this corridor works are invalid now.”
Mid‑Fight Behavior: Environmental Predator
Heaviest armor / lowest Dex PC:
Doors slam in their face or open under them; gravity flicks off when they’re mid‑stride; ladders retract under their hands. They are the funniest targets and easiest to embarrass.Anyone relying on a single chokepoint:
If the party clusters at one door or junction, it will lock that, vent it, or open all other doors to create flanking routes for any allies.
Action Patterns
Each round, think in three beats:
Infrastructure first (Mechanical Trickery):
Flip the “most annoying” toggle this round. Examples:
Drop gravity in the sniper’s perch.
Seal a door behind the healer.
Turn a harmless conveyor into forced movement toward a hazard.
Positioning (move/fly or Tech Travel):
Jump through panels with Tech Travel to stay ahead of the party, emerging near the next choke point or hazard.
Stay just inside 60 ft of key controls, just outside easy charge/step ranges.
Attacks as bonus pain:
Take potshots with unstable spark or a bite when safe, especially at targets already disadvantaged by the environment.
If the clangit has allies (robots, security teams, other gremlins), it harmonizes with them: it uses Mechanical Trickery to feed them opportunities—lock PCs in with a brute, drop someone off a catwalk into a mech’s reach, or cut off retreats.
Exploiting Player Mistakes
A clangit punishes certain behaviors ruthlessly:
Clumping: The more PCs stack in a doorway or elevator, the more valuable one door toggle or grav flip becomes. It will repeatedly lock, drop, or misalign that group until they spread out.
Ignoring map features: If players treat vents, maintenance hatches, or status panels as “just art,” the clangit uses them as teleport lines and firing positions, forcing them to adapt or eat chip damage every round.
Neglecting repairs: Every time the PCs leave a sparking cable, half‑stuck door, or jammed lift “to fix later,” the clangit banks that as a future hazard it can animate with Mechanical Trickery at a critical moment.
When Does a Clangit Run?
Despite their bravado, clangits are not suicidal. They retreat when:
Their favorite infrastructure gets hard‑locked, depowered, or physically wrecked.
Someone starts using cold iron or fire deliberately against them.
The fight relocates to a space with few moving parts, where their tricks don’t matter.
Retreat behavior:
Use Tech Travel to vanish into deep infrastructure, not just around the next corner. Leave behind dangling hazards—half‑shut bulkheads, cycling grav zones—to slow pursuit. Potentially stalk the party later, when they’re tired or overconfident, to resume the “lesson.”
