The empty skin of a shaman, howling full of
demon-winds. The shaman’s mournful former mentor always follows close
behind, abjuring the band from the worst of the demons’ excesses.
2
A foreign mandarin kept in an iron cage. They obey his orders unquestioningly, except when he begs to be released.
3
A slumbering maiden who whispers prophecies. Her seven sisters are tasked with deciphering them.
4
A corpulent cannibal. They’ve devoured all who challenged their authority.
5
A golden idol carried by straining slaves. While the sun is at its zenith the idol hisses its commands.
6
A bronze sword gone green with age, perhaps the first
of its kind. It speaks of bloody eons past and yet to come through the
one who wields it.
7
A wanderer from another world, thick-thewed and heavy-hearted. Nothing they witness here could shake them from their path.
8
A jolly merchant far from the trade-roads. She plies the band with her dwindling stock of narcotics.
9
The child of a band-member and a nightgoing spirit. Not
yet a year old and already fully grown, with a mouth full of
needlepoint teeth. Demands that infants be left out in the dark as
tribute to their unearthly parent.
10
A croaking, creaking crone who meditates atop a totem pole. From atop her perch she can see every hidden thing.
11
A living fossil that crackles with warped time. It hates the band as much as it hates everything else in the modern age.
12
A witch they’ve never seen. She delivers orders with swarms of mosquitos, and punishes disobedience with exsanguination.
13
The will left by the latest member who killed themself.
14
Whoever can shout the loudest when they gather for council.
15
A great slavering wolf. It swallowed their last chief
whole, but he still speaks from within its belly. Look down its throat
and maybe you’ll see him hanging onto its tongue for dear life.
16
Portents in the spilled guts of sacrificial victims. Sacrifices are thanked profusely for their contribution.
17
A fetus which grows but is never born. They seek ever-larger wombs to hold its bulk.
18
A being of fireless smoke. It wishes to burn the world to release its kin.
19
Tablets chiselled from the same huge sapphire, in a
language forgotten by all others. The procedures encoded in it have
carried them into and through countless catastrophes.
20
An intestinal wyrm puppeteering the body of their chief
from the inside, doing a poor job of impersonating them. It wants to
find water sources to lay its eggs in.
D20
This band fights...
1
Painted in poisons they’ve built up resistance to since the day they were born.
2
Alongside wicker war-golems.
3
Behind a carefully guided blaze of wildfire.
4
From beyond the horizon, with bows that require teams to draw.
5
Mounted on giant vultures. After battles they split the bodies of the fallen between themselves and their birds.
6
Wearing the skins of defeated enemies.
7
With mobs of crazed prisoners who now prefer death in battle to another moment at the mercy of their captors.
8
By burying themselves in a shallow layer of dirt and bursting out to ambush passers-by.
9
Clad in the gold-plated grave goods of someone else’s ancestors.
10
From beneath the elytra of a single enormous beetle.
The equally enormous ball of dung the beetle pushes before itself has
crushed many foes.
11
Without killing. Prestige among them is earned by bringing enemies as close to death as possible, but not pushing them over.
12
Atop carnivorous horses. Each rider is missing a chunk of flesh they fed to their mount to gain its trust.
13
In fits of stimulant-induced psychosis.
14
By swinging specially-bred dogs around on chains like living, snapping flails.
15
With termite mounds caked atop their hunched backs. The stinging insects swarm up the hafts of their weapons.
16
Bare-handed. Even their children are perfectly capable of tearing an armoured man apart with their teeth and nails.
17
By goading exotic beasts into doing most of the fighting for them.
18
By breaking and binding together their greatest warriors into a gestalt behemoth.
19
All tied together, in perfect sync. They never retreat and accept no surrender.
20
With comically long spears. Comic until you have to face the bristling, impenetrable mass of their battle-lines that is.
D20
This band worships...
1
A vast and bottomless pit. At the end of every season
the band convenes at it to toss down the spoils and slaves they’ve
captured since the last.
2
The stars. The band loathes the sun and moon for
obscuring their light, and seeks the means to the celestial bodies’
destruction.
3
Blood. Not a god of blood, but blood itself. Spilling it fresh is their communion.
4
Sweetness and lies, for sweetness is a sort of lie that
makes the harshness of the world bearable. They’re fantastic
storytellers who prize honey over gold.
5
Sickness, whose fever-dream gospel they wish to spread to the whole world. Each member of the band bristles with pustules.
6
A god who is yet to be. They scour the earth for signs of His coming.
7
A just god, for they are a scourge of justice upon a sinful world.
8
Lightning and thunder. Each band member is born in a set of twins. Storms send them into an ecstatic fury.
9
Scars. They believe each scar is the flesh of a god that saved them from a wound that would’ve otherwise been fatal.
10
Nothing. They neither respect nor fear anything that does not belong to the band enough to worship it.
11
Music. The universe is a song, and love and war alike must be conducted to its tune.
12
Every other culture’s monsters and demons. Surely if others fear them so much they must be mighty enough to serve.
13
Their ancestors, whose mummies ride beside them, lashed to their mounts.
14
Disembodied spirits. They leave corpses with their
throats torn out, so that those spirits might slip inside and enjoy
fleshy existence for a time.
15
A distant prophet. They send a rider laden with gifts to the prophet every so often. The riders have yet to return.
16
Plants. They will never eat a plant, and take care not to tread too heavily upon them.
17
Their children, who they see as conduits of divine
innocence. Grow up unbelievably spoiled, only to be humbled as they have
children of their own.
18
A psychedelic strain of mold. Without regular doses of it they’ll enter a mindless rage.
19
Darkness, as it will one day be victorious in its
battle against light, and must be made sure of who its allies are before
then. The band sleeps during the day and moves at night.
20
Time, the peerless bringer of ruin.
D20
This band practices...
1
Exiling their children once they reach puberty. They
are fully initiated into the band only if they survive to adulthood on
their own.
2
Marriage and consummation with various natural features. They believe this wins them favour with the spirits.
3
Never calling another band-member by the same name twice.
4
Marking the edges of its territory with inverted trees.
5
Selectively breeding bats according to strange aesthetics.
6
Carving gigantic erotic pictographs into the landscape.
7
Encoding their life history into beaded belts.
8
A sport based on tossing a bloated dead fish.
9
Contests of pain-tolerance.
10
Guessing the date of the end of the world in order to delay it.
11
Sculpting their hair into dioramas with clay and oil.
12
Forcible adoption of strangers into the tribe.
13
Elaborate exercise routines at each sunrise.
14
Sleeping standing up, with their eyes open.
15
Tattooing themselves with the images of faces they’ve seen in dreams as an apotropaic.
16
Constructing cargo cult mimicries of more advanced technology and magic.
17
Using the pincers of burrowing crabs as a currency.
18
Donning frightening masks when they expect to meet people who aren’t part of their band.
19
An unmatched oral tradition of theoretical mathematics.
20
Developing highly personal dance forms. Imitation is seen as a grievous insult.
D20
This band lives...
1
In huge, carved-out gourds. Roll their gourd-homes along with them when they move.
2
In a cave. A really big cave.
3
In warrens tunnelled through the earth.
4
Nowhere. They only exist when actively engaged in some mission or another.
5
In a tower and its surrounding rubble. They never stop
trying to build it up higher, and it never stops collapsing when it gets
too high.
6
Out in the open. They believe shelter to be a decadent excess.
7
Within a fort they deconstruct each morning and reconstruct in another location each evening.
8
In expertly camouflaged mounds.
9
On the undersides of big woolly beasts, in hammocks woven from the fluff.
10
In a tent inside another tent inside another tent
inside... you get the picture. The more prestige a member has in the
band, the further in they live.
11
On lashed-together rafts. The thought of being on land when they sleep fills them with superstitious dread.
12
In a convoy of wagons.
13
Within the ear of the strongest band member, in a palace of wax. They shrink as needed to come and go.
14
Inside their own memory. They launch raids from museums and universities where their artifacts are studied.
15
In the brambles of a bush of black roses.
16
Hanging off a cliff-face with ropes and oversized pitons hammered into the rock.
17
Secretly, in a city’s sewer system, at perpetual war with albino alligator-men.
18
Parasitically, pretending to be members of larger bands.
19
In shelters of leaves stuck together with cobwebs.
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