Cracian thumper

Cracian Thumpers were bipedal animals originally from the Craci system. Their usefulness as a riding and pack animal saw them exported and widely used throughout the galaxy. They were a central component of the Rebel Alliance's program of live mount scouting, and were the basis of the popular sport of Cracian Thumper racing in places such as the Tapani sector.

Biology
Thumpers were agile, bipedal creatures, with a powerful whipping tail, and with forelimbs and hindlimbs that were both sharply clawed. They were herbivorous, and had hard, flat teeth for eating vegetable matter. Their feet were padded, and the incredibly soft touch with which the Thumper moved gave it its ironic name—it should have thumped when it ran, but a Cracian Thumper made nearly no sound at all. A fully loaded Thumper could carry a load of one hundred kilograms of rider and/or cargo, and could travel at 35 kilometers per hour.

Temperament
Cracian Thumpers were very loyal, obedient, and largely non-aggressive creatures. They were quite smart for beasts of burden, with intelligence more typical of domestic pets; they could be trained to follow verbal and touch commands, to distinguish between friends and enemies when properly trained by their masters (a task made easier when "enemies" had such easily identifiable characteristics as the hard white shell of an Imperial stormtrooper), and some could even be taught to attack on command.

When roused to fight, either when threatened or when so trained, Thumpers were formidable opponents. A Thumper would attack with its sharp foreclaws and by whipping its tail; the latter was capable of beheading a stormtrooper with ease. They were also capable of lashing out backwards with the sharp claws on their hindlimbs while at a full run.

History
Cracian Thumpers were native to all five worlds of the Craci system, located just inside the Corporate Sector. Long used by the native Cracians as beasts of burden, they proved to be indispensable mounts and pack beasts when marketed to the galaxy at large. By the time of the Galactic Civil War, there were millions of them on Human-populated worlds, making them one of the most common riding beasts in the civilized galaxy.

When the first colonists of Jomark left for their new world a few thousand years prior to the Galactic Civil War, they brought several Cracian Thumpers with them. This small seed population soon bloomed, and by the time of the Thrawn campaign, herds of wild Thumpers plied the forests of the main continent and a few of the larger islands of the planet, in addition to the many domestic Thumpers still used by the colonists for a number of tasks. A colonist sent to bring a message to the dark Jedi Joruus C'baoth rode a Thumper over the steep roadway to C'baoth's High Castle.

Cracian Thumper racing was a very popular sport, especially within the Tapani sector. The Tapani Arts and Sports Complex on Vycinyth maintained large stadiums and arenas suitable for a number of sports, including Thumper races. The Heatherdowns Hotel and Track on Tallaan maintained a five-kilometer oval track for Cracian Thumper racing, ringed by thousands of seats and bleachers; it also maintained gardens and training facilities in the center of the track.

The Cracian Thumper was one of the primary live mounts used by Rebel scouts. Live mounts like the Thumper were more difficult for Imperial sensors to detect than vehicles like speeder bikes, and, if detected, were likely to be dismissed as a wild animal. The ubiquitous presence of Thumpers on planets across the galaxy meant an Imperial sensor operator would not find the presence of the beast out of place on nearly any world on which he was stationed; if lazy, there was less than a fifty percent chance he would send a patrol to investigate. The success the Rebel Alliance had with the Cracian Thumper and other pack animals led them to quickly domesticate several of Hoth's tauntauns as mounts when establishing Echo Base.

Thumpers were also popular with Alliance Special Forces. Their frequency of appearance meant Wilderness Fighters and Pathfinders could be used on thousands of planets without drawing attention, while Infiltrators enjoyed the incredibly stealthy nature of the creatures.

Barosa Warren, the Morellian founder of the galaxy-renowned Galactic Outdoor Survival School, was known to be familiar with Cracian Thumpers. The Rodian tour guide Meebo kept a dozen Cracian Thumpers at his facility on Dalicron-4. He used the beasts for his hunting trips. When Rebel agents sent by Luke Skywalker came to Dalicron-4 approximately four months after the Battle of Hoth, Jhara, the granddaughter of the man who sent for Skywalker, acquired several Thumpers from Meebo as transportation from the village of Dalia to her family farm. Upon finding her grandfather dead, Jhara and the Rebels set out on these same mounts to find Caeleb, a child with exceptional Force potential and the objective of the Rebels' mission.

Behind the scenes
The Cracian thumpers were first described in the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook published by West End Games in 1990, with their visual representation drawn from unused concept art for the tauntauns seen in The Empire Strikes Back. They were repeated in a number of other roleplaying game sourcebooks, but made their first appearance in Timothy Zahn's novel Dark Force Rising, published in 1992. Capitalization of the creature has varied between "Cracian thumper" and "Cracian Thumper" across sources.

Thumpers share a very similar outward physiology to another riding beast, the rockhopper of Biitu and Roon. Whether this similarity is due to genuine relation or convergent evolution is unknown.

Appearances

 * Child of Light
 * Dark Force Rising