The Clam People
The Untamed Tribes are a diverse group of beastfolk that, for one reason or another, never joined civilization after the Accord that ended the War between Heaven and Hell. Some of these tribes rejected society to follow their own esoteric goals (like the hermitic tortoise-like Chelonians), others out of pure spite (like the crocodile-headed Sobekian, sworn to make those responsible for the War pay).
But the clam people? The clam people never interact with other nations or cultures out of plain and simple indifference. They don’t care for other people; they apparently don’t care for anything at all.
They don’t trade or socialize, they barely speak to each other using hand signs, they seem to have no art or craft, and they don’t wear clothes. They spend most of their days underwater, with their collarbone shells closed over their soft, mollusk-like heads. They are filter feeders, nourishing themselves simply by staying still in the sea. Very rarely, they emerge to search for partners. If two compatible clam people make eye contact, they will immediately and wordlessly mate. Once finished, they will ignore each other and return to their anodyne lives.
Many have tried to understand the clam people, hoping that communication might lead to some useful insight, some good or resource. Some sadistic and unscrupulous hunters have even thought of exploiting the clam people for slavery, but even that venue produces nothing of value- kidnapped and taken away from their sea, the clam people will stay closed up and let themselves die. The Gnomish Sheikhdoms, whose southern borders overlap with the core of the clam peoples’ territory, are responsible for most attempts to create relationships, but all to no avail. They have even constructed two colonies in the middle of the clam peoples’ land, just to be ignored.
The tritons of Axam have had more success: their monks are masters of mind magic, having refined powerful telepathic techniques in the Mind Reef of the shattered Astral Plane (also, the common affinity for the sea turned out to help a lot). The monks were able to pierce the minds of the clam people to learn that, while underwater, they simply dream. They exist in a perpetual state between wake and sleep and, strangest of all, their minds are filled with images they could not possibly have seen.
A clam person dreams of events taking place in other times and other places, impossible and nonsensically disconnected. How could a clam person, never leaving the coast of Uxali, dream clear images of the Ziggurat-Cathedral of Goetia or the kind eyes of a Holy Cow?
Hundreds of miles inland from the clam peoples’ territory lie the Dreamlands, shards of the Astral Plane accessible only in dreams, now collapsed into the material world. These extraplanar fragments are little known and poorly understood, existing as they do in the center of a cruel desert fifty miles from the nearest habitation. The very few who have seen these realms have described them as “solid illusions”, changing for each person that visits them and governed by an incomprehensible but instinctively intuitive logic.
Perhaps the influence of the Dream Landscape, whatever it might be, reaches to the coast while somehow missing the Sheikhdoms. Perhaps the clam people are connected to those places- perhaps their ancestors lived there. None will ever know for sure, as no sacred text or ancient historical record makes any mention of the clam people. Only a minor Apocryphon kept in the Enigma Library mentions that, for exactly nineteen days, two thousand years ago, all the people of the world dreamed of eating mussels every night.
