The Ice Clans

 

The Southern Nomads inhabit the steppe country that girds the end of the world. Beyond their territories lie blasted polar wastes: black rock, white snow, blue ice, and a sun that drives people mad.  

There are people who live there, and to their northern brethren they are holy people, closer to the sky and the stars than any other. 

They say that if you look into their eyes you can see, buried deep within, the gigantic wheeling of the constellations, the glittering arcs of cosmic bodies, the frozen void space that is the home of the sacred progenitors of cognition. 

The men and women of the Ice Clans are tall and rangy. They eat only meat and blubber, and they do not work metal, though some will carry knives and other steel and iron necessaries traded with their northern neighbours. They are stereotyped as direct, simple minded, and prone to casual violence. Their reputation with other nomads is something like that of the Mountaineers to the Baronials -  simple, honest, pious, wrathful, fey. 

Trepanning is nearly universal, and cannibalism is widely practiced - the Ice Clans take a equivocal stance to meat and sustenance. When they raid they fight with axes, picks, and bows. To pursue them onto the wastes is death. 

In game, stat Ice Clans as Southern Nomads with HD1+1, and access to light armour at best (no shields). All members of an Ice Clan band will be trepanned, and as such will have access to a single gift from this list. 

Sky-Gazers

A strange type of holy person, solitary and detached even by the standards of the southerners. Sky-Gazers move from clan to clan on vast circular pilgrimages across the ice. Each walks the orbit of a celestial body, whose interests they claim to represent on the terrestrial surface. Sky-Gazers speak rarely, and when they do it is usually in declamatory hate-poetry against sentient life. The Ice Clans treat them with reverence and fear, and provide them with food and shelter during their endless elliptical wandering. 

Sky-Gazers are conduits, like Mentats. Unlike Mentats, who maintain a degree of autonomy, a Sky-Gazer is nearly literally instrumentalised by the power that they serve. The Star People can use a Sky-Gazer's eyes to look out into our world, from a human point of reference. The Star People mostly have no need for or interest in the vision mechanics of a human, but they can hijack Star-Gazers to use like camera puppets to facilitate this when they wish to. 

Unlike the frightening but mostly incidental contact that most nomads have with the Star People, a Sky-Gazer can expose you to their terrible vision-consciousness directly. 

In game terms, a Sky-Gazer is an Ice Clansman or Clanswoman with a gaze attack that deals 2d10 psychic damage to a single creature that they can see, or d6 psychic damage to everything they can see. 

Unlike most gaze attacks, blinding yourself, closing your eyes, and using mirrors as reflectors has no effect. The 'gaze' is actually just a video camera feed to the being that is causing the damage, and that being does not give a shit about mirrors, or whether you can see it. 

The bodies of those slain in this manner disappear.

The eyeballs of a Sky-Gazer have strange properties. If you place them inside the sockets of a corpse, they will 'beam' the last things that the corpse saw in reverse, from from moment of its death, like a projector. Like a projector, this is useless if you don't have a surface to project onto, and it can also be used as a bright, directional light source. The video feed will play backwards for the exact amount of time since the Sky-Gazer's eyes were removed from their head.

If you implant a Sky-Gazer's eyes into a living body, they immediately become a feral ghoul-like thing bent on the destruction of all sentient life. If you do this to a PC, they immediately become an insane and dangerous NPC and their player must roll a new character. The Southern Nomads call these things devils or abominations. The hostility of the astral minds must be channelled through its appropriate agents - when the Gazers are slain and their eyes taken, it is only right that punishment be visited on those responsible. 

An Abomination is HD2+1 (or the HD they had in life, whichever is higher), x2 hands-like-claws as light weapons that deal cold damage, unarmoured but takes -1 damage from weapons, movement: human, disposition: clever and motivated serial killer. 

They constantly intone hate poetry in the language of the stars. They are unbreakable, and impossible to reason with. Northern Nomads kill them on sight, but Southerners and Ice Clans will instead attempt to restrain and 'keep' them as honoured guests. 

What this usually means is a gagged and bound ghoul-thing propped at the head of the communal table, given the choicest cuts and the best liquor, which it will not be able to touch, much less eat, and everybody present trying their best to avoid looking at its terrible, straining, bulging face. 

Stairs to the Sky

When the nighted heavens are draped in coloured fire it is said that one might find a stairway up into the strange cities and territories that can sometimes be seen behind the shimmering curtains of light. The stairways are made of glass or ice or starlight - the stories differ. They will deliver you into a Dreamland utterly unlike the one you know. Travel up into and then back from these strange passages is how Sky-Gazers are made. Many young, pious nomads go in search of them, and many are the frozen corpses of those searchers littering the ice floes. 

Mobile Fortresses

A persistent myth in the Southern territories. The Mobile Fortresses are said to be built from star metal, and excavated from solid core ice over hundreds of years by chosen Ice Clans. Those who are able to excavate them after decades and centuries of labour are said to be biding their time, waiting for the end of the world, which they will bring about with their terrible engines. 

Mobile Fortresses might have legs, tracks, they might fly, they might burrow beneath the earth. There are a hundred different stories. They are built from strange iridescent metal, and they effect subtle changes on their inhabitants, who grow taller, more slender, more terrible and more beautiful. 

None can truthfully claim to have seen one.

A Mobile Fortress is a dungeon like any other, and must be navigated like one. It will always have a heart and a brain (usually in rooms close to the centre), and if either are destroyed it will be 'killed'. You might consider using this dungeon as a template that can be reskinned. 

A Mobile Fortress is inhabited by Star Children, which are what remains of Ice Clans whose ancestors spent centuries in the holy work of excavation by hand.

Star Children are long limbed, slender, flexible, vibrating, with strange reflective skin and terrible eyes and faces. They are said to be beautiful, and they are said to be monsters, perversions of the human form.  

Star Child

HD3, armed with an invisible heat sabre (medium weapon, +1 fire damage, invisible blade makes defending against it difficult - heat sabres roll to hit at +2) and empathy (see below), unarmoured, but perfectly reflective skin confers immunity to psychic, radiation, and fire damage. Movement: like an octopus and a cockroach walking around using a mostly human skeleton. Disposition: curious, capricious, unpredictable. 

Star Children do not eat, drink, or sleep, and do not (or cannot) speak. They can share emotions and simple concepts (friendly, distressed, 'over there', go away) via telepathy if you look into their eyes, or if they touch your bare skin with theirs. 

If they want to kill you, they can use this innate ability to 'link' enemies together such that what one feels, all feel. In game terms, every enemy that falls under the gaze of a Star Child takes the damage that every other enemy under the gaze takes. Blinding yourself against gaze attacks works as normal, and a mirror will additionally subject the Star Child to the effect. 

Star Child Astral Raider

What remains of clan champions and leaders.

As Star Child above, but HD4, possessing four additional invisible arms, two invisible heat sabres, and an invisible Star Weapon, rolled for on the usual tables. This Star Weapon does not have ammunition as usual, and usually contains a single shot which immediately recharges under starlight.  

Astral Raiders can 'flick' their skin from reflective to Vantablack or Vantawhite at will. Vantablack renders them immune to cold damage and needing to breath, and Vantawhite confers AC as plate and confers resistance to normal weapon attacks (half damage). 

Star Child Projector Captain

As Star Child above, but HD5, and possessing the gaze attack of a Sky-Gazer. A Projector Captain's gaze attack has a 360 degree area of effect. 

Projector Captains are completely invisible, and can see invisibility. They can make other objects permanently invisible by painting them with their blood. 

They can confer the ability to see invisibility to, or blind, others who they are able to touch skin-to-skin. Both of these conditions are permanent, and can be resisted with a CHAR save, although the Projector Captain can attempt to do so again next turn as long as the skin-to-skin contact is maintained. 

If you drink their blood, your soul will henceforth be invisible to beings that would otherwise be able to sense it.