Wasters
The Izean Wastes are pockmarked with craters of unknown origin which contain lucrative gems and minerals embedded into their floor. Despite the harsh, cold, desert weather there are a few clans hardy or foolhardy enough to live there. These hardened few are known as Wasters. They are humans, descended from clans who were cast out centuries ago that fled to the north to escape persecution or worse.
In the early years of their exile they subsisted on what little they could find in the wastes and eked out a miserable existence. It is only within the last century or so that they started venturing south with the sought after fruits of their mining. There, in the Izean Basin, they found that the descendants of those who cast them out had nearly forgotten they existed and certainly had no cause for malice against these strangers from the north. The Wasters found that they could sell their ores and gems for significant sums and purchase goods here which would help them build their meager villages into fortified towns with creature comforts they had not known for centuries.
Despite their newfound wealth and somewhat safer reality, they remain a very closed-off society which is disinclined to socialize with outsiders except in circumstances of trade. Their towns are now significantly protected against natural threats as well as those from their fellow man which gives them the luxury of keeping to themselves and enforcing that isolation if necessary. It is said that one only visits a Waster town if they have been invited first, and even then the welcome is unlikely to be very warm.
While the Wasters have a reputation for being standoffish with outsiders, it is known that they are remarkably friendly with their brethren in the other Waster clans. Over the years there has been remarkably little armed conflict between the clans and there is ample evidence that they will socialize with each other and marriages across clan boundaries are quite common. In fact, it is likely that this willingness to intermarry with other clans is the reason that they have survived as long as they have without genetic diseases and other such consequences of inbreeding found in small populations.
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