The nomadic ethnic group commonly known as the Foresters call themselves the People of the Cloud Forests, in reference to the heavily wooded foothills of the Great Range in the far west of continental Kauln. Their clans have wandered those forests and the western steppes for millennia, herding, foraging and hunting the beasts of the mountainsides. Though they lack a written language of their own, they have an ancient and complex oral tradition, passed on through unbroken lineages of storytellers and shaman-chieftains. During intermittent times of settlement, their clans are insular and fiercely defensive of their hunting grounds, but if a wandering clan encounters another on the steppe, they will meet as friends, tend to each other’s sick and exchange ancestral stories. As an ethnicity, they are known for their great height and strength, and are famously ferocious warriors. They are loosely related to the Inandica of the southern plains, who are descended in part from Forester clans that renounced their nomadic ways.

The Foresters have long existed on the margins of Aede’s major civilisations, sometimes left in peace, sometimes subjected to terrible pogroms and wars of religious conversion. The onset of Aede’s colonial era led to mass enslavement of many Forester clans, and the significant Forester population of modern Kauln is largely descended from those slaves. During the Apostate’s War, the Foresters were among many ethnicities declared subhuman by Nilen’s regime, and in eastern Kauln they suffered a genocide almost as total as that of the Hannevara and Esuloans. The surviving western clans were conscripted into the loyalist armies en masse, and Foresters made up a significant fraction of the army that finally liberated the Crown City.

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Following the Salvators’ defeat, the Foresters were forced to adapt to the end of their ancient nomadic lifestyle, struggling to settle into Kauln society, where they were still largely treated as second-class citizens. Though officially legal discrimination against them is prohibited, they face de facto segregation across most of Kauln. The participation of many Foresters in resistance movements has caused the kingdom’s security forces to view the entire race with thinly-disguised suspicion.