You'd heard the word "raider," but you'd still wondered your whole lives why your neighbors bothered with their pointless militia. That is, until the day they blew into your hometown like a sandstorm, but even noisier and probably causing more damage, overall.

Drawn—from what you can tell—by the skyfall that destroyed the salt mine, they came to claim the skymetal lode for their own and showed no hesitation at the prospect of fighting the Aster for it. Attacking in the aftermath of a devastating explosion, they gave no warning and took no prisoners. Thankfully, you and the guild enforcers were able to fight them off, but not before they wounded a number of townsfolk and killed several more.

Waste raiders are outlaws beholden to no guild or even to guildless independent townships. Characterized primarily by savagery and insanity, they are the worst kinds of criminals—either because they started out bad, or because isolation, dehydration, starvation, or something else drove them to barbarism. A raider follows no law and has no compunction about stealing, assaulting, destroying, killing, or whatever other malice crosses their twisted mind on a given day. What's worse, few raiders last long on their own; instead, they band together to form packs like desert predators, laying claim to a swathe of dust as their "territory" and marauding throughout the area. Travelers in the region are subjected to ludicrous tolls of water or worse, and innocent wasters or vulnerable guild civilians on the edge of a sweep zone suffer constant terrorism from the local bands. Water guilds occasionally mount punitive expeditions on raider holdings in attempts to keep their numbers in check. However, since your harsh world means there is never a shortage of people doing without, there is likewise a self-replenishing supply of these heat-maddened bandits.

Even among themselves, raiders are pointlessly vicious and unpredictable. Joining a clan or gang offers some semblance of belonging or even of family, but there is no consistency of custom between one and the next save for violence. Cruelty is the determining factor in the average outlaw hierarchy, with those who can fight or murder their way to the top reigning supreme until someone else gets bored or jealous enough of their antics to claw them down. Raider chieftains often style themselves as "lords" or "kings" or some other title as empty as the dunes in which they reside, maintaining their petty rule by having the largest hoard of water, weaponry, and skymetal technology. These are the things every such thug craves, and parceled out to favorite followers, they may buy a canny leader extra time on the throne—but it always ends the same, sooner or later. The wastes are decorated with the bones, skulls, and tanned hides of deposed raider tyrants who thought themselves untouchable.

Some clans are always on the move in search of fuel for their jury-rigged vehicles, while others see enough success to build up something like a stronghold. In both cases, the local raiders usually become recognizable to their victims thanks to whatever arbitrary symbols they concoct—until authority changes hands, when people may think they're being attacked by an entirely different threat as a gang's newest tyrant casts off their predecessor's branding and plasters their own over everything. This is part of a cycle, as individual raiders find meaning in particular keepsakes, tattoos, scars, loot, or whatever and scrabble to have their existence acknowledged by an uncaring world. The nihilism that underlies typical outlaw insanity often manifests in this constant quest for validation, for the moment-to-moment rush of fighting and the always-temporary thrill of bullying others. Those moments before, during, and just after a raid are filled with sick glee, but the ones in between are marked by frustrated waiting and desperate hedonism. The distant Divines are of no distraction in the frenetic lifestyle of a waste raider, but they may obsess over some treasure, perceived power, or unwholesome desire sufficiently to cobble together a kind of cultish behavior around it. The smartest bandit chieftains fan the flames of these foolish illusions, using them to guide their minions more effectively. When they fall from power or the gang loses enough interest, though, everything tends to disintegrate fairly quickly.

This holds true for most things to do with raiders: Their strategies, their alliances, even their gear—all suffer from the same neglect and carelessness with which most such criminals treat their bodies and sanity. While a random marauder may compulsively care for their favorite gun or get far too invested in a wild hairstyle, the average kit consists of rust, stains, and patch jobs. Raiders do whatever they can to look fierce, so armor is smashed together from scraps and spikes, weapons are stupidly altered to include an ineffectual number of hooks and serrated edges, vehicles are fitted with flags or crests of blades and wire, and so on. The overall state of their equipment is poor, which feeds into the archetypal ganger irritability and their never-ending hunger for more spoils. It's an endless downward spiral that's never pretty.