Ostrich Riders

The Ostrich Riders are one of the independent tribes of Prax, an oddity that appears as little more than a footnote in most travellers’ tales of the region. Small in stature and smaller in number, they seem almost irrelevant alongside the mighty Bison and Llama riders and the multitudinous Impala Riders. The Lunars paid them little attention when they invaded, and the more dominant nomad tribes regard them as not much more than a joke. Yet their history is as entwined with that of the region as those of the five main tribes. They have lived alongside their powerful neighbours for over a thousand years, always surviving, always clinging on despite ridicule and ignorance of their ways. 

Unlike the greater tribes, they cannot milk the beasts they ride, and their nomadic lifestyle is constrained by the need for their ostriches to make sedentary nests in which to brood their eggs. The largest cult in Prax is that of Eiritha, but the Ostrich Riders have a different mother deity, one unknown elsewhere in the world. She descends from the enlightened Sky Pantheon not the blustering of Storm or the base passions of Earth.

Others may laugh as they ride their birds and hunt with boomerangs instead of bows, but they know the truth: they are the inheritors of a glorious past.

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This is a description of one of the lesser, ‘independent’ tribes of Prax. It includes brief character generation rules for the Ostrich Riders, and a description of the cult of the Ostrich Mother, central to their culture. It also includes a brief history of one of the ostrich clans, with twelve NPCs that can provide interaction or story possibilities for RuneQuest or QuestWorlds games in Glorantha.