Glamour Walker

No one really knows what a glamour walker looks like. Usually it is noticed only as a ripple passing through some other illusion, like a stagehand brushing a painted backdrop. Sages guess that, stripped of its glamour cloak, it is an ugly little thing about 4 feet tall with wrinkled green skin under thin yellowish fur, a turnip-shaped head with a few tufts of hair, spindly limbs, an opposable thumb and two big fingers per hand, and three toes on each foot. Nobody has ever confirmed this.

These creatures go about their own simple business, uninterested in the affairs of others, though by drifting through the illusions of powerful realm denizens they overhear a great deal and could tell remarkable stories to anyone able to find one. Fights with them are rarer still than meetings.

A walker needs active glamour to travel, so it unconsciously keeps encounters tense. Whenever active glamour risks exposure, its presence raises the glamour scores of everyone involved by 10, if they have at least slight glamour to begin with. It manages this as often as three times in one encounter, each time an illusion begins to falter or the scene starts to resolve. Even allies feel it, suddenly suspecting perfectly innocent companions. It means no harm; it simply needs the glamour to last.

Walkers usually slip past unseen; noticed as a ripple, they freeze and try to blend in. Their glamour score only measures how sharp a viewer's perception must be to see that ripple; to see the creature's true shape, a perception score must top its glamour score by 20 or more. They navigate glamour with extraordinary perception but cannot otherwise bend it.

Attacking a walker, or piercing the glamour some other way, shatters the illusions around it. Exposed, it drops to movement 3 and AC 10 and loses 1d8 hit points for each day it stays visible. If fighting cannot be avoided, it throws the glittering shards of broken illusion as missiles. Each shard bursts into a random illusion on striking a target or the ground, with damage limited as for seemers; the game master may choose the illusions or treat the shards like a deck of illusions. It uses the confusion to escape.

Painfully shy, a walker cannot stand being watched or being near anyone aware of it. Captured, it ducks its head, tries to shrink out of sight and bargains for freedom with anything it owns, from secrets to spare shards, while watching for a chance to use a shard as a distraction.

Solitary wanderers, they seek a comfortable illusion to live in, preferring passive, semipermanent glamour that veils the landscape over the active illusions spun by powerful denizens. They stay several weeks unless the illusion shifts or someone sees through it, and travel by using active illusions as bridges between passive ones. A sharp-eyed hero facing a huge dragon might see a ripple slide along its belly, proof that the beast is false.

Beyond their ripples, walkers leave no trace on the world. They eat broken illusions, the fragments left when a perceptive character sees through glamour, and when they die the glamour absorbs their bodies.