Raiders of the San Saba
Firebrands
Location: Bravado, Dune Sea, Scattered through the San Saba region
Keywords: Raider, Aberrant, Fire, Trailblazing
Half pirate, half untamed animal - the Firebrand Raider clans have navigated the Dune Sea for decades. In the wake of the Second Stampede however they moved eastwards to greet the flames. Largely psionic, these raiders revere heat in all its sundry forms. They can be recognized by their goggled, bug-eyed look, with spent shell casings and blast glass (sand superheated by an explosion) adorning their ragged ponchos. These raiders make sport of hunting the sandfins and leviathans that lurk under the still waves of the Dune Sea - and occasionally flatten entire settlements by luring these monolithic beasts too close to civilization.
The Firebrands appear to fall into two subtypes, the Slaggers and the Flametouched. The Slaggers are generally aggressive, melee threats that wear armor and shields, and can even operate vehicles in a limited capacity. The Flametouched are Firebrands that have awakened their psionic potential in the form of pyrokinesis. They are ecstatic, frantic figures, and often mutter sounds and phrases that evokes prayers and songs.
Empowered variants of these raiders with enhanced psionic abilities are known as Soulflame Raiders, and generally are marked by a glowing psionic crystal they carry. A massive war party of Firebrand Raiders is often called a ‘conflagration’.
Ships go missing, sometimes they wreck. Sometimes the entire crew gets infected with Bad Brain and they forget to come back. Out in the smokes, on the spoiled waters of the coast, ships draped in viscera, with skinsails bloated in a red breeze, the Drowned Ones are as good as dead. They hunger, so they hunt. They never return to shore. Their ships grow steadily shoddier. They replace the rugged wooden and iron workings with the mutable flesh of their prey. Over time, decay wins. The ships sink and the biomass returns to the open-water mortis. but not before becoming a splendid and terrible figure in the bedtime stories of fishmonger’s sons.
Drowned Ones are aquatic relatives of the Pit Stop Raiders foundly commonly on land. They wield salt-encrusted, rusty weapons and harpoons, as well as crude nets that allow them to capture their prey. They are normally only found on the open water, as their flesh-covered ships tend to attract the attention of the Cicatrix, the morgue near the Clutch. However, small raiding parties have been sighted along the waterways and rivers connecting back to the Spoiled Coast, and the beat of drums from their ships often announces an imminent raid on the mainland.
Stormchasers
Location: Waking, Nomadic bands throughout the region
Keywords: Raider, Evolved, Trailblazing
Stormchasers are a unique tribe of raiders, a variant of the Rust Raiders found throughout the Lone Star, who are attracted to electricity and strong radio waves. They can operate vehicles in a limited capacity and fly using whatever rudimentary technology gets them up into the air; generally hot air balloons, captured airships, or attached to the fetid and buoyant forms of Bloaters; zed that, in a fashion, fly.
Stormchaser Raiders fetishize electricity and harvest it directly from the lightning that passes between live thunderheads. The city of Waking possesses some two thousand lightning rods across its length - making it a lurid flame to the Stormchaser moth. The follow in the wake of the massive airship-city, and are known to raid ground settlements of unfortunate survivors near the flight path of Waking.
Stormchasers adorn themselves with ropes and riggings from captured airships, and implant makeshift lightning rods on their armor to attract lightning. They work themselves into a frenzied state around sources of technology, and researchers in Waking have suggested that they may be overly sensitive to sound waves or electro-magnetic frequencies. They paint themselves with crude blue markings, and destroy anything mechanical they can get their hands on, rendering it to nothing but scrap and destroyed bits in their murderous frenzy.
As the lost city of Barogue began to collapse in on itself - a new type of enemy appeared from the wreckage, and from the morgue - The Resonant. These crystalline raiders are a powerful threat, easily recognized by their eyes and foreheads encrusted entirely with a bismuth-like crystal.
The Resonant were first thought to feel your emotions and primitively track their prey this way, but later encounters suggest that they might simply sense psionic potential of aberrants. They seem mildly telepathic and can react to strong emotions and fear in their prey. They can paralyze their prey with fear, and use wicked claws to take down a survivor for later feeding.