Savage Sands: Groups

Back to Main Page

Groups

Hillrend Mercantile Co.

A large trading company whose caravans regularly (but not always) make it through the magic storms, but nobody outside the company can figure out why.

Arcanum

A group who believes that technology is responsible for the world's fall. They want magic to completely supplant it. Membership is heavily biased towards 'new world' species like the Elves; Who (for reasons unknown) have a lot of trouble with modern devices. Ishtri has been approached by their recruiters several times. Arcanum's base of operations is within a 'cursed' area, that causes all technology to rapidly decay. But they don't have much influence in the wider wasteland. Mages are just too rare for this plan to work. Arcanum is trying to increase the percentage of those born with magic; So far without success.

Band of the Hand

Growing up as a sand scavenger, Kai had regular run ins with the Band, as their primary function outside communities is snatching up the artifacts and raw materials unearthed by scavengers to sell in the towns and stealing them. The Band rarely injures or unalives their prey unnecessarily, as it pays to leave them healthy enough to keep working so they can rob them again. In the towns, the Band practices all sorts of street larceny, and Kai continued to have run ins with them as Fletcher Jon's apprentice. They are useful fonts of info from time to time, but Kai avoids working with them openly if he doesn't have to, preferring to indelicately pluck what he needs straight from their brains. Members of the Band all have a life-sized five fingered hand branded somewhere on their flesh. Their cover in communities as caravan/travel protection out in the desert, is what allows them to opperate openly in the towns. They typically ride large flightless birds adapted to the desert outside the walls.

Kai's reaction to them is decidedly negative, but he has and will work with them at need.

The Broken Finger

They're a splinter group who parted ways from the Band of the Hand not too long ago, taking about a "finger's" worth of members with them. They have the same hand-shaped mark as the Band, but always marred in some way, in order to show that their ties to the old group have been broken. Those who left were some of the more ruthless members, the ones a little more "flexible" when it came to leaving robbed scavengers alive and intact. It's not as reasonable or sustainable an approach as the Band's, but their leadership figures that if they create a fearful enough reputation, it'll eventually lead victims to meekly hand over their cores when The Broken Finger rolls onto the scene. Better that, than trying and failing to resist the Finger's "leave no survivors" policy if someone tries to fight back.

The Broken Finger has one edge that other groups don't, but they can't properly leverage it (yet). Either their leader, or some of the lieutenants, have enough weird science acumen to build and maintain a few self-propelled, Mad Max-style land vehicles. Theoretically this makes them highly mobile, and fast enough to beat the Band's slower bird mounts to a target. The problem is that the vehicles are core-powered, and that means it's far too expensive to just send them tooling around aimlessly across the desert, just hoping to randomly run into victims.

If only they had some way to conduct aerial surveillance on the surrounding areas . . .

Which is where Crissal comes in. The Broken Finger are good enough mechanics to keep a few wasteland junkers running, but mechanical flight is way beyond their capabilities, so they've approached her several times about joining up for a cut of the proceeds. They figure it'd be really hard for targets out in the open desert to hide from someone like her, someone with an aerial perspective. A friendly spotter in the sky could alert them to potential targets ahead of the Band, and let them use their vehicular speed to hit and run before anyone else got the chance.

The problem is that this is all completely antithetical to Crissal's beliefs and values, so she's declined each and every invitation, with increasingly harsher words being exchanged each time. The Broken Finger isn't inclined to take "no" for an answer, though-- because they really can't. Their whole "business model" won't work until they can reduce their fuel costs. Due to this, they're only operating at partial capacity right now, and not even able to turn a profit. So their membership's getting increasingly antsy. Who knows what they'll try soon, if and when their patience comes to an end . . .

Blood Hunters

The Blood Hunters are a group of big-game hunters who specialize in dangerous prey. Most of them are pure mercenaries who take out monsters or weird animals that are threatening communities; a few are adrenaline junkies who hunt for the thrill of it.

Shadoweye briefly considered joining the Blood Hunters if they would have him, but their focus on killing and mercenary attitudes unnerved him. There are dark rumors that some Blood Hunters sell their services for non-animal targets, though these have never been confirmed.

To be clear, Shadoweye's attitude toward the Blood Hunters is wary and cool but not openly hostile.

Notable NPCs

Bloodclaw

Shadoweye has an on-again, off-again relationship with a female rakashan Hunter known as Redclaw who he encounters periodically in his travels; both know they'd make a terrible couple, but both appreciate the other as an occasional fling.

His attitude toward Bloodclaw is more like "I know we're bad for each other but I don't care."