Renegade Halfling

Renegades look like other halflings of the desert world: 3 to 4 feet tall, 50 to 60 pounds, built like small humans, with faces like wise, lovely children. They live up to 120 years. Their speech of hoots, shrieks, howls and whistles sounds more like a forest at night than a language.

Bands of 10 to 60 carry daggers, short swords and other small or medium weapons, usually of animal bone and occasionally of humanoid bone, along with leather armor and small shields. Roughly three in four have the powers of a psionicist of 5th level or higher (often 6th), so they lean on mental powers more than weapons, and their defense modes get +1 when the attacker is a psionicist of another race. Many carry mindroot, which pushes their strong psionics even higher.

Their typical powers: in psychokinesis, the sciences telekinesis and detonate, with devotions animate shadow, levitation, control flames and molecular agitation; in psychometabolism, the science shadow form, with devotions body weaponry, flesh armor, double pain and heightened senses; in telepathy, the sciences mind link and tower of iron will, with devotions contact, ego whip, id insinuation, mental barrier, mind blank and mind thrust.

Most halflings of the desert world live in the reasonably civilized clans on a forested ridge beside a mountain range, but renegade tribes live in remote forests and jungles near those same mountains. They are far crueler than their cousins and feel no racial loyalty, only devotion to their own tribe, so a halfling in a party will not stop them from attacking it.

A tribe holds two to twelve families of three to five each, living in big huts of saplings and bamboo thatched with ferns and tropical fronds. Every member must serve the tribe's goals, usually survival but sometimes raids on villages or other halfling tribes, and those who work against it are cast out, some sent into the jungle with nothing but their wits. Some tribes have learned to farm mindroot, normally a rare plant, in large gardens, giving them a valuable trade good and a potent weapon.

Their diet includes plants, though meat is strongly preferred, and like all halflings of their world they see other creatures as food and assume others see them the same way. Approach any dealings with them very carefully.