B/X class reskin: Wombat

Wombat

Requirements: Minimum Con 9
Prime Requisite: STR
Hit Dice: 1d8
Maximum level: 12
Allowed armour: Any, including shields
Allowed weapons: Small or normal-sized (see below)
Languages: Alignment language, common, wombatese, dwarfish, gnome, goblin, kobold
Saves and level as per Dwarf

Wombats are stout, hairy marsupials who average a height of approximately 4 feet and weigh about 150 pounds.  Wombats live underground and value community, sensible planning and well-built earthworks.  They have a reputation for being pragmatic, practical and utterly without romance.  That last part isn't true of course, but other races find "My darling, my only one, I've invested in a blue chip stock that pays an annuity which will support us in our old age" an unconvincing declaration of love.

Abilities
Combat: Wombats may use any kind of suitably-shaped armour, but only small or medium-sized weapons.  A wombat can use digging tools such as picks, chisels and shovels as weapons without penalty.
Infravision: Wombats have the ability to see in the dark with infravision up to 60'.
Fateless: Due to a common ancestor making a deal with the gods, divination spells with wombats as the target automatically fail.
Padded posterior: Backstabs against wombats do normal damage, even on a critical.
Strewth, what a beauty: Immune to fear effects from magical creatures.  Does not apply to undead or spell effects.
Burrowing animal: Suitably-equipped wombats can tunnel through soft earth at 1/4 normal movement rate and through hard-packed earth at 1/10.
Sapping: Provided there is access to the earth beneath, a wombat has a 2-in-6 chance of undermining a fortified barrier in a useful timeframe.

Drawbacks
Vegetarian: Wombats require 2 rations for every one that another race would eat, due to picking out and discarding the meat.  A level-1 wombat in a wilderness area has a 1-in-6 chance per hour of foraging enough edible tubers to make 2 rations.  The chance increases to 2-in-6 at level 4 and 3-in-6 at level 7.

Reaching 9th level
When a wombat reaches level 9, he or she has the option of founding an underground burrow that will attract wombats from far and wide, who will elect them mayor.  Wombats usually live in townships, so businesses and community groups from other nearby settlements will expand into the wombat's burrow.

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Digger by Ursula Vernon is my favourite fantasy graphic novel.  It's about old curses, forgotten gods and the value of making friends in strange places.  It knows the value of following tension with a little comedy or even just some time for the characters to sit on a stump and think.  It's a compelling story, which I'm not going into because I'd genuinely hate to spoil it for anyone who has a chance to read it.  It won a Hugo award and you can read it online for free as a webcomic, so there's nothing stopping you.

It's probably not giving too much away to say that the main character is a displaced wombat who's uncomfortable dealing with gods and regards magic with nothing but contempt.  Named Digger, because that's a perfectly respectable name for a wombat.  Ever since noticing the OSR movement, I've wanted to play a Digger-style wombat in a game.  When I read Patrick Farley's article in Fight On! about penguins as a player race, it didn't seem quite so far-fetched.

Wombats are tunnellers and builders, which puts them in the same conceptual space as dwarves.  The class template above is mostly reskinned Dwarf.  I tried assembling it from scratch using Erin Smale's article on building classes, but it quickly began to look so Dwarf-like that I gave in and used Dwarf as a base.  The wombat has more race abilities, but they apply in very specific situations, so I hope the vegetarian drawback justifies levelling like a Dwarf.

A wombat's life tends to be more prosaic than a dwarf's.  They don't write grand sagas, but they do write their elderly aunt Matilda, because she doesn't get out much these days and could use the distraction.  They like comfortable burrows rather than grand underground galleries, because if you dig too deep it's balrogs, isn't it?