Dreamwild Nomad [Human]

Dreamwild nomads are big, rangy people. A grown man stands around 6 1/2 feet, a woman barely shorter, and both carry the lean strength of folk who walk everywhere and hunt every meal. Outsiders dismiss them as barbarians, but their worldview is subtle and nearly as strange as the warping land they roam. Their speech matches no tongue any scholar knows, and nothing in their ways ties them to another human people.

Before a hunt or battle, nomads paint their skin with ancestral marks meant to give them power over beast or enemy. Most wear tanned hides and bear wooden shields, for AC 8, and otherwise fight like ordinary men. In melee they use long, slim spears tipped with stone, treated as javelins; they are not balanced for flight and the nomads rarely throw them. For range they carry short bows, and about one nomad in three has arrows dipped in a mild hunting poison (Class C, onset 2-5 minutes, 25/2d4).

Years in a land of constant hallucination have toughened their senses. A spell meant to fool any of a nomad's senses fails 25% of the time, and even if it takes hold, the nomad saves against it at +4.

A tribe numbers 10-40 adults, about equal men and women, plus children equal to another quarter of that total who neither hunt nor fight. Both sexes share every task. One adult in ten is a leader of 5 HD with THAC0 15, so a tribe may have several. No nomad casts spells of any kind.

They raise nothing permanent and keep moving in search of food, water and shelter. They do not smelt metal but carve wood skillfully and shape some stone into small tools and hunting gear.

Their homeland has taught them that nothing obeys rules; a tool or spell may work one day and fail the next, so cause, effect and science mean nothing to them. Their answer is a creed, roughly put, that what they cannot perceive is not real. A visitor who steps out of view stops existing until seen again. They trust no thing, idea or memory to endure, make no long-range plans or promises, and simply accept the world without trying to shape it or join in. That makes them maddening to deal with, but it keeps them sane where natural law has collapsed.

The nightmare realm has no true ecosystem, so their role in it is hard to judge. Even in a stable land these simple hunter-gatherers would leave little mark.