Shad

Shad are small humanoids with gray skin, cropped hair, large eyes and big ears they load with earrings. They speak their own language and like to sew precious stones onto their otherwise plain clothes. Many dismiss them as vermin, but they are surprisingly clever.

Their spears, short swords, daggers, knives, staves, clubs and axes are made of ancient wood or stone. The weapons look primitive but hold sharp edges and are built tough, since shad must fight natives of Earth made partly or wholly of rock.

Centuries in a brutal environment have left only the hardiest alive. Poison, disease, paralyzation and petrification cannot touch them, and they get +1 on saves vs. spell, breath weapon and rod, staff or wand. Thin and wiry, they can squeeze through gaps as small as 6 inches square, sometimes smaller, and wriggle out of almost any bonds, skills that keep them out of the hands of the dao slavers who hunt them.

For every ten ordinary shad a tribe usually has a champion of 3 or 4 Hit Dice, sometimes carrying a wooden shield that improves its AC by 1, to 5. A few priests and even druids exist among them, rising as high as 6th level.

Long ago, druids from a lush prime-material world set out to remake the Elemental Plane of Earth as a realm ruled by plants, as the plane of beasts is ruled by animals. Finding nothing suitable (one layer of the Abyss had plants, but not the right sort), they carved air-filled caverns through the plane and planted them, piping in water through temporary gates to the Elemental Plane of Water and light through rifts to the Quasiplane of Radiance. Over generations the gardens spread and grew strange: trees as tall as mountains, vines that moved by themselves, fruit with uncanny properties. Then some unknown enemy, perhaps the dao, perhaps the pech, perhaps a foe from the druids' own world, slew every caretaker, and the gardens withered.

Living in the trees, unknown even to the druids, were hordes of little gray humanoids. As the giant trees died they scattered through the empty grottoes and made the plane their home. Nearly everything native to Earth treats them as invaders and enemies, yet they thrive because they adapt quickly and breed fast.

Unable to pass through stone, these nomads occupy existing caves and passages and sometimes laboriously dig their own. They are not aggressive when fed, but they distrust strangers and assume everyone is an enemy or a rival for scarce resources.

Their priests and druids can conjure small patches of plants and fungus and tend them in the dark, watered by rare seeps from the Elemental Plane of Water. The tribes eat from these gardens but always leave some growing, perhaps a dim memory of the old druids' mission. Because shad live short lives and breed quickly, they carve warning symbols into the rock near dangers such as unstable ground, for other tribes and for their own descendants, who may never have seen the hazard. Other marks point to water and hidden food. Outsiders cannot read them without learning their secret, but travelers who do find the plane a bit easier to survive.

Outsiders in their own adopted home, shad wander the tunnels in search of water and air. They eat the plants and fungus their priests raise and any edible foe they kill, which is not many, though khargra innards cook up well. They also eat their own dead, apparently without harm, but never kill one another for food. Some scholars suspect they descend from insects that mutated in the druids' giant trees, though that only raises the question of where the insects came from.