Wandering Seer [Human]

The wandering seers are a secretive, roaming folk whose dress and customs recall the gypsies of legend. Their oral histories are vague about their origins but agree that their ancestors fled a dreadful shadowy foe that can still reach them. They are dark-complexioned and wear vivid colors; hair is usually black, now and then amber, and their dark eyes have a strange inner light. Some tribes look faintly eastern. Besides the common tongue they share a secret language, with trail signs, much like thieves' cant.

Many seers are able fighters or thieves; spellcasters are scarcer and mostly female. They carry swords, daggers, cudgels and light axes, and seldom use ranged weapons beyond slings, light crossbows or a thrown dagger.

Many have the evil eye, a gaze that pours hate, envy and fury into whoever meets it, three times a day. It takes one of five forms, usually hold person or monster or a curse, more rarely fear, charm or suggestion. A save vs. paralyzation resists. Any form but the curse lasts 2-5 rounds, and failing the hold save by 4 or more adds 3 rounds of disabling convulsions. The spoken curse works like reversed remove curse and can afflict a person or an object.

Seers rarely stay anywhere over a week. A caravan of 5-50, generally one extended family, follows a matriarch aided by a male captain; at 30 or more members she is at least 5th level and he 4th, and the very largest have leaders of 8th and 7th level or higher. Any caravan includes entertainers and fortune-tellers, warriors and rogues of nearly every class but paladin, and female mystics and healers instead of priests. Families live in small painted wagons with arched roofs, trailed by horses, mongrels, caged hens, a goat or ox and sometimes a dancing bear.

Caravans form tribes, and tribes form three nations. The smith-folk work as tinkers, smiths, healers and beast-trainers, outfitting armies and adventurers and happily serving both sides of a war. The revel-folk are musicians, dancers and swindlers who can charm a hostile mob or talk a village into losing its savings at a rigged game, and who also hire out as smugglers, abductors and killers for any side, calling such work fated. The rare lore-folk, seldom met beyond one family, stand nearest the ancient legends, make amulets, charms and potions, and are rumored to bend time and space and to guard their kin against the old enemy.

Their fare is roast meat, fruit, milk and strong coffee. Outsiders may be befriended, guided or cheated, but are never truly part of the fellowship; among their own, seers prize honesty and loyalty. They oppose an ancient evil only if it threatens them, otherwise moving on, and a seer who truly serves evil is always an outcast. Reputed thieves, they earn a living through readings, small magics and shows. As guides they always deliver clients where they asked, exactly to the letter of the deal, and cleverly keep every bargain even with rival parties.

Leaving the caravan changes a seer. Outcasts exiled for crimes against their own, such as murder, look starved and hate-filled, take whatever they think the world owes them and often lead bandits; they lose foretelling but keep the evil eye. When one dies, nearby seers sense it and come to bury it properly, or it rises as undead to keep collecting. The shadow-born, a boy of a cursed union, has true foresight, is fated to serve the old enemy, blinds all seer prophecy around him and often resists the evil eye; one lore-folk tribe must kill him before adulthood, or his unique dark powers grow as he lives. Settled seers lose their sight, turn nervous and solitary, and fight with wild despair. The spirit-crone, whom outsiders call a witch, has left her tribe after some tragedy to talk with ghosts in dead languages; attacking her brings a swarm of incorporeal undead and many powerful curses.