Recluse

A recluse is a woman of the wandering seers who has abandoned her clan to commune with the spirits that crowd the misty dread realm. She still wears her people's bright, colorful dress, but she cackles at shadows flickering past her fire and chatters in dead tongues to ghosts no one else can see. Her eyes and attention dart about constantly as she listens to her unseen company, and most people take her for eccentric or mad.

She speaks her clan's language and about half a dozen ordinary human tongues, and has often picked up three or four forgotten languages from the spirits.

Recluses are decrepit, and the thought of one in melee is laughable. Attacked, she does nothing to defend herself, but she is far from defenseless.

She is a master of her people's evil eye, and whoever kills her is cursed at once with a deadly fate: perhaps every enemy who strikes the killer always rolls maximum damage, or every saving throw the killer attempts automatically fails.

Worse, the killer draws spirits. Within 24 hours a ghost, spectre or similar incorporeal undead begins tormenting the murderer, and another arrives with each passing day until the character is surrounded by hostile spirits. Only bringing the recluse back to life ends the haunting.

Every recluse reads the seer's cards. Through them she can produce any Divination-sphere priest spell or any Lesser/Greater Divination wizard spell, casting at 13th level; each takes just 1 round and needs only the deck as a component.

She lives alone among spirits as maddening as they are wise, drifting further from the real world each year until she cares nothing for human affairs.

Answers have a price, usually a deed that helps one of her spirits, such as solving a murder so the victim can rest. Only after the task is done will she reply, and then in rambling metaphors and riddles, so understanding her can be as hard as getting the answer.

Her meals run to oddities such as stewed bat wings and the tongues of lizards. Perhaps it sharpens their spirit-sight, or perhaps such things are simply what the strange places they live provide.