[QUOTE=The Compendium][B]Penin[/B]
Often considered blunt and distrustful, penin is a race that keeps mostly to itself, only admitting to interacting with outsiders when conducting trade with other races, or in the odd event when unwelcome strangers manage to stumble too near one of their cities in the hostile regions of northern Wegam Fermos, where there are plenty of mountains in which to build settlements and even more plentiful resources of ores and stone. The penin boast of their bargaining-skills, and their boastfulness is well-earned, for they are amongst the most stubborn and headstrong creatures in all of Reniam, but at the same time also some of the most indulgent and merry once they know that they are amongst friends.
A penin is a humanoid of modest height, rarely even growing to be four feet tall, but are very proportionally broad and powerful for their size. While most of their bodies are built the same way as that of any other humanoid, there are certain differences, such as the fact that both their heads and hands are incased in a tough naturally occurring bone-armor, appearing to be a sort of exoskeleton that covers all except their eyes, nose and mouth. The extra skull makes the penin's heads almost impossible to crack, and the bone-plates on their hands enable them to handle things that are too sharp or hot for unprotected hands without any discomfort. On top of this natural armor, the penin enjoy a remarkable constitution and amazingly durable bodies (proof of that is the fact that they enjoy drinking the beverage they call Finest like humans drink ale, despite of Finest literally being able to melt a person's hair, skin and eyeballs if getting in contact with them), making them notoriously hard to kill - especially since most non-lethal injuries just tend to piss them off. It was supposedly their very durability which caused the natural development of their mastery in the forging of weapons, as well as them being able to handle red-hot metal with their bare hands. Starting out hard to kill, penin naturally needed better weapons than other races in order to kill each other, and in order to protect against these better weapons, better armor was needed, etcetera, etcetera. Today, the penin have the greatest masters of metallurgy, masonry and carpentry in all of Reniam, and their forges are the origins of the finest weapons and armor in the world.
In battle, penin tend to take advantage of their hardiness, making tight formations to prevent their enemies from passing by them when forced to fight and hiding behind massive walls and siege-engines when trying to outlast their opponents - the latter being their favorite manner of achieving victory. Although penin - with habits that lead them to drink, fight and generally be in rather life-threatening situations during the practice of their crafts - rarely live to die of old age, they can live to be up to three hundred years old.[/QUOTE]