The Rhowari, or Rovers as they are commonly called, are a group of people without a permanent home. To them, the open road is the only home they will ever need, traveling the world of Cairn in a lifelong pilgrimage to cleanse themselves of worldly temptations and the corruption of civilization.
A culture that spends its days wandering with no fixed home.
The group is usually persecuted, or at least distrusted in the lands they travel through, because of their nomadic ways. They tend toward the mystical side of things, although they're rarely an entire race of Wandering Wizards. They might believe in witchcraft, psychics, fortunetelling, or other superstitions not held by the majority, but they aren't necessarily any more talented at it.
Whether or not the people choose not to have a permanent home varies: some find it spiritually valuable to move among many groups of people, while others were uprooted decades or centuries ago by prejudice and oppression and deprived of their ancestral lands. In other cases, nomadic lifestyles are prompted by harsh environments or extreme seasons, which require people to move around to avoid extreme conditions. Many nomads are hunters or pastoralists — farming and mining aren't really options when you don't stay in one place, requiring wandering tribes to instead follow the migrations of similarly wandering herds of game or to drove flocks of livestock across the land.
These cultures are generally portrayed positively and assist the protagonists, who may join them for a time on their quests and seek their guidance, as they are often keepers of old traditions nearly wiped out and will remember lost knowledge and legends the protagonists need to hear. As such, these people often function as an Aesop Enforcer or contain a Hermit Guru. They're also likely to provide a Bedouin Rescue Service.
When the protagonist actually hails from the culture instead of being an outsider, protecting and reviving its traditions will usually be a major factor in their motivations, and they will generally be separated from their fellows.
Many of these societies will be Born in the Saddle, if they move over land, or Born Under the Sail, if they're sailors by inclination. If they have any kind of formal settlements, they'll often be some kind of Mobile City. These groups are often Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of real nomadic cultures, such as the Mongols, Turkic Peoples, Apache, Romani or Irish Travellers — or, more likely, stereotypes of them. Among fantasy races, centaurs are often depicted as nomads, and it's fairly common for Cat Folk based on big cats such as lions to have a similar lifestyle.
Supertrope to Space Nomads, which is this trope in space. Compare Walking the Earth, which is about a singular character, and Magical Romani, which may overlap.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Mushishi has the Watari, a tribe dedicated to observing the light flow of the land. Having no permanent home, they go where the flow is strongest and live there until the light flow wanes. Some members also make a living off of letting others know about peak Kouki activity in certain areas.
- Tales of Wedding Rings has the catfolk, whose original homeland of Needakitta was destroyed by the Abyss King. After he was defeated, the dwarves helped the catfolk build a Mobile City to act as their new home, and the Needakitta catfolk have been roaming the world ever since.
Art
- Beast Fables: Certain weremammal nations, such as elephants, are constantly migrating. The closest things they have to settlements are portions of cities ruled by non-nomadic people.
Comic Strips
- Flash Gordon (2023): The Lion Men are nomadic, a lifestyle that was forced upon them when Ming destroyed their home city during the conquest of Mongo.
Fan Works
- Breaking the generational cycle: In chapter five Emerald and Agatha force Chelsea into taking them to the mermaid's kingdom only to find it abandoned. Chelsea reveals that for the last fifteen years mermaids have been constantly wandering the ocean to stay safe from krakens.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: The orcs of the dwarven mountains live in nomadic groups to avoid being hunted down by the dwarfs as easily, as Ami explains when talking about her potential orc recruits to people to warn them.
- The Land of Dragons and Dungeons: The Phooka, or Wild Elves, are nomads who travel across the world in brightly colored caravans and have very little interest in settling in one place for long. Phooka bands are known on almost every continent, wandering across the lands and earning livings through peddling, entertaining, and petty thievery as they go.
- The Legend of Genji: The sandbender tribes were traditionally nomadic traders and scavengers who wandered the Si Wong Desert atop sand-sailers. When the Earth Federation took over, they attempted to erase the sandbenders' culture by forcing them to move into urban areas where they struggled to adjust to the stationary nature of city life.
- The Victors Project: The Campers were a culture of wanderers who emerged during the Hundred Year Darkness between the collapse of the modern nations and the formation of Panem; there is some debate in-universe as to whether they are descended from the historic Romany or are a superficially similar group that developed independently. Before the Dark Days, they wandered between the districts doing odd jobs and performing; following the civil war and the Capitol's crackdown on inter-district travel, they clans were forced into sedentary life. Most assimilated into their new residences, but the ones in District 5 have retained a distinct culture.
- A Witch in Broad Daylight: The Apple Family are a clan of nomadic werewolves that travel from place to place as a caravan, not welcome in any one city for long. They're worshipers of the Darklord as well.
Film
- Grass: A 1925 documentary—one of the first feature-length documentaries ever made, in fact—about the Bakhtiari tribe, a group of herders, as they make their annual winter pilgrimage from Anatolia to Persia, where there are winter grasslands for pasturing their animals.
Literature
- The Belgariad: The Algars are Born in the Saddle to the extent that they follow their horse herds and refuse to domesticate them. They have one city, but no one lives there and it was built as a distraction, to give their enemies something to attack other than the wandering tribes.
- The Chronicles of Dorsa:
- The Terintan desert nomads from Terinto, Joslyn's people, who travel constantly around as they herd their animals. Most everyone else in the Empire views them as superstitious barbarians, but also being tough warriors (which is true).
- The tinkers are wanderers too, the name deriving from many men fixing things, but the women are fortune tellers. Many men are also traders.
- Circleverse: Daja's people, the Traders, are nomadic merchants who live in caravans or trade ships. A lot of their customs are based on the Roma, including less-portrayed ones like strict taboos (Daja is made an Un-person due to being the Sole Survivor from her family's shipwreck, since they believes she's cursed as a result with some incredibly bad luck), and ritual purification must be done if they're ever violated. However, unlike in most portrayals they're black people.
- The Cosmere has a very long-term version in the Iriali, who believe that they must settle on seven worlds for religious reasons. When they're first seen in The Stormlight Archive, they've been on Roshar for thousands of years, but their entire culture revolves around being ready to go when "the time" arrives. The time arrives in Wind and Truth, when the entire country leaves through a portal right before the Night Of Sorrows.
- The Custard Protocol: The Drifters are an offshoot of the Bedouin who have taken to living in airships. A group of them help the Custard crew escape pursuers in Imprudence, and take in the werelions at the end.
- Earthsea has the Children of the Open Sea, a tribe of raft-dwellers who only come to land once every year, when they need to cut some trees for their homes. They provide a Bedouin Rescue Service to the heroes in the third book.
- The Fire's Stone: Chandra, Darvish, and Aaron run into the Shoi people who assist them on their quest, who are a culture of wanderers that Aaron has met before in his own homeland. They are noted for perhaps having magic and being a race of wizards, but Aaron knows better.
- The Founders Trilogy: Giva is a nation of a couple of thousand people that's entirely made up of ships moored in the open sea, meaning that it can change its location at any time as needed.
- The Han Solo Trilogy: In prehistory, the lion-like Togorians wandered the endless plains of their homeworld as nomadic hunters, following the herds of game animals that they relied on. In the present, after the advent of agriculture and technology, female Togorians have shifted to a sedentary lifestyle, living in cities and herding the domesticated descendants of their ancient prey, while male Togorians continue to wander the plains and return to the cities every so often to reconnect with their mates.
- Heralds of Valdemar: Shin'a'in clans roam the Plains so their herds always have fresh grass. There's not much focus on Mage Wars-era Kaled'a'in but there's some suggestion that they were nomadic too. Tayledras, for their part, pack up their Vales and move on as soon as they've cleared the land around the last Vale, but that's a lengthier process.
- John Carter of Mars: The Green Martians are nomads, and are the only ones of the five main races of Barsoom to live this kind of lifestyle.
- Judy's Journey is a children's novel about a 10-year-old girl and her family, who out of desperation and poverty are forced to become migrant farm workers. Many migrants do it out of desperation, like Judy and her family, but for others it's a more permanent lifestyle. Judy meets one family that has been migrating for years and has earned themselves a rather nice mobile home to live in.
- The Kingkiller Chronicle: Kvothe is from the Edema Ruh, a Romani Fantasy Counterpart Culture, that travels in wagons their entire lives and values storytelling and keeping old stories alive.
- The Lord of the Rings: In the town of Bree, Frodo and his friends learn about the Rangers, described by the innkeeper Butterbur as "the wandering folk", who live a wandering life in the wide and sparsely populated lands of Eriador between Bree and the Misty Mountains. The Ranger Strider especially is described by Butterbur as "disappearing" and returning to Bree at irregular intervals and without any apparent explanation. The inhabitants of Bree consider the Rangers as mysterious and suspicious, although overall their attitude towards them is ambivalent, as Butterbur admits that Strider "can tell a rare tale when he has the mind". Eventually the hobbits learn that the distrust against the Rangers is very much unjustified and that the Rangers are really the last remaining Dúnedain of Arnor, i.e. descendants of the Númenóreans and the former ruling class of the defunct kingdom of Arnor, and are actually protecting the peoples of Bree and the Shire from orcs and trolls invading Eriador from the Misty Mountains.
- A Memoir by Lady Trent: The Ghalb have a culture distinct from other Akhian tribes, largely based on the Bedouin. They have no territory of their own, but practice a nomadic lifestyle, paying a fee for safe passage through other tribes' lands. They are forbidden from owning horses, and most don't even own camels, only sheep and donkeys. Because they don't wage war with other tribes and travel all across Akhia, they are sometimes employed as guides by other tribes. Despite this, other Akhians look down on them as "carrion-eaters" because they do not slaughter their meat according to Segulist or Amaneen law.
- The Neverending Story: Head-footers are a bizarre Fantastican folk with long, thin legs growing directly from the bottom of their heads. They spend their lives always on the move, wandering in groups of many hundreds.
- Overheaven:
- Tenere is a "meta-state" within the URS comprised of the Tuareg people, who spend most of their time traveling the Sahara as nomads. They plug in at the Trees to meet up and participate in democracy.
- A small example. Hundreds of Samoans in 2022 find work as EVA techs, living nomadic lives in one-man pods orbiting Earth as they travel from station to station, doing odd jobs and fixing things. They periodically return to the islands to rest, visit family and swap stories.
- The Greys are nomads who live on the far side of Luna, descended from helium-3 miners.
- The Rusties are nomads of the Martian deserts who live off the grid, away from the colonies, keeping to their clans and their rovers.
- Mercury is home to a culture of nomads who live in the Central Wastes, worship the sun and gene-mod themselves to have reptilian traits.
- The Mariners descend from miscreants and free spirits of all stripes who took to the newly formed seas as Ganymede's ice melted. They travel about in their sailing ships, steering clear of the isle-dwellers and their rules wherever possible.
- A Queen Of Gilded Horns: The Roune Lands are full of "roving bands of thieves," most notably the Tribe which keeps the old khimaer magic and traditions alive after they were routed from their own kingdom, and are faithful to one day reclaiming their country and roaming no more.
- Reborn (2023): The church of Suoduny, the god of fate and seers, doesn't have a stationary temple. Instead, the priesthood wanders around in nomadic camps and are guided by the visions from their head priest of where they should go.
- Redwall: The Guosim are a tribe of argumentative warrior shrews who roam the waterways of Mossflower Woods in logboats and frequently give aid to the protagonists on their quests and in defence of Redwall Abbey.
- Ringworld: While many Ringworld hominids formed sedentary agricultural societies long ago, many others still lead nomadic, non-settled lifestyles. Many tribes of the herbivorous Grass Giants, for instance, live largely like grazing megafauna, wandering around between different grazing grounds, while the diminutive Red Herders travel endlessly as they drove herds of livestock or pursue migratory game animals.
- The Steerswoman:
- The Outskirters are nomads, traveling from place to place with their goat herds. In The Outskirters' Secret, one of them recounts a legend about the first Outskirters that explains why they never settle down in one place.
- The steerswomen have a central location at the Archives, but are expected to spend their lives traveling and gaining knowledge, only returning to the Archives to add to it or when they can't travel any more.
- The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human: The dwarfs started aimlessly wandering the world after having their homeland conquered, offering their smiting services to whoever pays.
- The Sunlit Man: The supercharged sunlight of the world of Canticle will melt anything it touches. As such, cities on Canticle are in constant motion to stay ahead of the sun, with individuals at most touching down for a few hours to harvest from the fast-growing plants or mine resources from the constantly reshaped ground.
- Talion: Revenant: Many of the Uls (people descended from disinherited royalty) live this way. The Ulbands are travelers who live in painted wagons, often living as fortunetellers, with their vehicles and clothing known for having vivid colors. Given there is a lot of prejudice toward them as some uls have started civil wars trying to take their thrones back, there is some similarity with Roma and Irish Travellers.
- Villains by Necessity: The Gypsies, naturally, who are basically all the Romani stereotypes transplanted into the book's universe: they are nomads who live in painted wagons, have an old woman who's a fortune teller who's really capable of seeing into the future at least somewhat, and a boy who pickpockets Sam (though he's just showing off-he gives back Sam's pouch immediately). In the book they're always portrayed very sympathetically as Sam is inspired to keep going on the quest as the forces of "Good" might repress their culture over not confirming to their rigid Knight Templar morals otherwise.
- Warrior Cats: The Sisters are a group of female cats —male kits are sent off when they reach adulthood— who wander nomadically instead of holding a set territory, and range in a wide area adjacent to the Clans' lake territories.
- The Wheel of Time: The Tuatha'an (or as most people within the story call them, the Tinkers or the Traveling Folk,) are a nomadic culture based on real-life Irish Travellers, down to the 'tinker' slur and the reputation for being dishonest. Their name is inspired by Old Irish words meaning "people of." They're known for their devotion to pacifism even under threat of death. They travel the world in brightly-painted caravans of wagons in search of 'the Song', which they believe will bring about the return of the Age of Legends. They're widely distrusted due to a reputation of thievery, as well as being blamed as kidnappers when non-Tuatha'an choose to leave their homes to join them in traveling.
Live-Action TV
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has the Harfoots in the Second Age — who are the ancestors of the modern Hobbits from the Shire — survive via stealth, moving from place to place, setting up temporary camps and moving on when resources run out, or danger approaches.
- The Wheel of Time (2021): The Tuatha'an are nomads who constantly travel around to look for a song, doing work to sustain themselves in the meantime. Many people distrust them as a result, wrongly believing they're thieves. However, in fact they're strictly pacifist and benevolently let strangers into their midst.
Roleplay
- New Magic Academy: Staying in one place isn't exactly feasible when a maelstrom of magic could destroy or transform your settlement, so the people of Amnoxis tend to move around.
Tabletop Games
- Cyberpunk: The Nomads are descendants of the US citizens who chose not to reintegrate into the NUSA after the collapse of the original United States. Instead, they band together in large clans and rove the wastelands that span the space between megacities of North America in heavily-customized cars and trailers.
- The Dark Eye: The two main human cultures of this kind, Norbards and Zahori, are strongly inspired by jewish and romani culture respectively. To a lesser degree, the Nivesian culture (fantasy counterpart to Finish), who travel the northern continent alongside their deer herds twice a year, qualifies. On the non-human side, there are the horse-riding Steppe Elves and most of the traditional Orcish clans.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Across most editions, centaurs are wilderness nomads whose clans follow long, winding paths across temperate and tropical lands, sometimes making circuits of entire continents that take generations to complete.
- Quarapahons — stout, blue centaurs with hairless lumpy skin, four eyes, and two mouths — lead nomadic lives, wandering aimlessly in small tribes on plains and savannas as they hunt big game and look for fights.
- Wemics, lion-centaurs with feline humanoid halves, mostly live in nomadic prides in tropical grasslands, keeping to a Neolithic level of culture and following the herds of game that they hunt. In Forgotten Realms, the wemics of the Dalelands are instead wandering pastoralists.
- Basic Dungeons & Dragons BECMI D&D module CM1 Test of the Warlords: Nomadic barbarian tribes wander the land of Norwold year-round. As long as dominion leaders allow them free passage, the barbarians won't cause any trouble. If the dominion leaders do try to block them, they could go to war.
- Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition:
- Catfolk have a tendency towards curiosity and wanderlust, so not only do they not build permanent settlements, they also don't become attached to specific territories like other nomadic cultures. Their cultures wander semi-randomly across the warm and temperate grasslands of the world, living off the land and occasionally trading with other races.
- Duskling clans are nomadic, "simply because they are incapable of settling in a fixed location". They'll linger for at most a month in a given place, setting up tents or just sleeping in the open air, and then move on.
- Halflings are portrayed as a nomadic people, moving about in caravans of sturdy house-wagons escorted by mounted outriders. Some halflings do buy land (usually from other races who owe them a favor) and build residences, but these have a high turnover rate as homeowners sell the places after a few years to go back on the road, and the only permanent residents are elderly halflings unable to endure the rigors of travel. Still, such halfling towns make for natural rest stops for the caravans, as well as places to bank money... and fence stolen goods.
- Lhosks are gorilla-spider people who wander nomadically in jungle lands. They will build shelters for themselves, but abandon them after just a few days as the group moves on to new hunting and foraging grounds.
- Dark Sun: "Wasteland" tari are nomads who drag their few possessions on travoises as they scavenge for food, and might use a crodlu or inix as a pack animal, although corralling and taming the beast can cost the tribe many lives. They'll attack humans and similarly-sized opponents only if the tari outnumber them three-to-one, launching a pre-dawn assault. Larger threats they'll leave alone unless the creature is weak or injured, in which case the tari will trail it in the hope that it succumbs to the desert.
- Dragonlance: The kyrie used to live a nomadic existence, making decades-long circuits of their home islands, but were reliant upon a magical navigation aid called the Northstone. Then the minotaurs stole that Northstone, stranding the kyrie on Mithas for a time until it was recovered, and now the birdfolk are claiming the Blood Sea Isles as their own.
- Mystara: While they're limited due to being surrounded by mountains, Ethengarians do not build cities, and tend to travel, only settling in camps, called yurts, on winter. The Golden Court is the only yurt that settles regularly in the same location each year, being the capital, and even it travels between two locations for winter and summer.
- Planescape:
- Abyssal giants are nomads who move between layers of the Abyss, hiring themselves out as mercenaries to the local until they inevitably begin fighting with their new neighbors and moving on. They'll also roam onto other planes like Pandemonium, Hades and even Carceri.
- Bariaurs — goat-centaurs native to Ysgard — possess a natural wanderlust that keeps them from establishing permanent settlements (with the exception of the town of Steadfast), and most don't bother constructing houses for themselves.
- On Arborea, bralani spend their time wandering the deserts of the layer of Mithardir in whirlwind form, covering hundreds of miles each day and only stopping to prank travelers or attack evildoers.
- Ravenloft: The Vistani are heavily inspired by the real-life Romani. They mostly make a living travelling between the domains of dread, trading in jewelry and rare goods, or doing small jobs for locals. While they're considered suspicious-to-outright villainous in earlier editions, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rewrote them as being seen with some suspicion, but also a welcome change of pace in the otherwise monotonous lives of Ravenloft's denizens. In early editions, they experienced a magical compulsion that forces them to stay on the move, which they try to ignore and instead insist that it is entirely their choice. 2nd and 3rd edition sourcebooks imply a certain level of denial and sour grapes mentality stems from the Vistani's unacknowledged envy of the stability of a non-nomadic life. 5th Edition largely removes this curse.
- Spelljammer: The one thing that has remained consistent in hadozee lore throughout the editions is that they love to travel, and they are happiest joining sailing ship and spelljammer crews so that they can travel far and wide, founding new enclaves in the cities of any race willing to host them — especially elf cities.
- Exalted: The Delzahn are a majority-nomadic group of tribes (while there are some who live in permanent cities, the relations between them and the nomadic tribes are poor). They're Born in the Saddle, with a test of horsemanship being the Rite of Passage for male Delzahn, though they don't exclusively ride horses — camels and large emus are also popular mounts.
- Legend of the Five Rings: Unicorns appreciate having returned to their ancestral homeland, but they are still restless, curious people. About 40% of the clan population are permanently nomadic herders.
- RuneQuest: Doraddi are nomadic as a rule, wandering around as whim, opportunity, and need dictate and often simply ignoring the boundaries that settled kingdoms try to draw. The Kresh people take this an extreme, living on immense wagons that are drawn by teams of dozens or hundreds of people that never stary in one place for more than a month and in some cases may never stop at all. Kresh matriarchs live on the wagons alongside piles of magical possessions and trade goods, and often never leave them at all, while men defend and pull the wagons; they subsist through a combination of trading and extorting goods and food from groups that they encounter.
- Warhammer 40,000: The Genestealer Cult of the Toothed Coil live as nomads in open plains and grasslands of Imperial worlds, which they roam in caravans of trucks, buggies, and bikes centered on huge wheeled meat-processing plants, hunting and processing herds of megafauna. They rely on their mobility and rootlessness when they fight, coiling around less mobile foes and springing ambushes from hidden positions.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Ogors rarely make permanent settlements, instead they follow great migratory routes called Mawpaths, growing steadily larger as the spread out in search of more and more meat. The Butchers use their Gastromancy to divine the will of Gorkomorka and follow the trail of the freshest and most plentiful meat, while hunters will scout ahead. Gutbusters usually take the lead, while the Beastclaw Raiders stay on the outskirts to avoid bringing the wrath of the Everwinter down on their less-resilient cousins. Its an uneasy truce between them and one that often descends in open warfare.
- Warhammer Fantasy Battle: The Centigors' inability to craft any kind of material goods or structures, combined with their resilient horselike bodies, leads to them living nomadic lives on the steppes and the ragged edges of the Old World's northern forests, finding what little shelter they need in rocky hollows and copses of trees before moving on.
Video Games
- Dragon Age: The Dalish elves are nomadic, although not entirely by choice; they keep moving around both to avoid potential conflict with humans (many of whom do not especially like elves) and also to keep their mages from catching the attention of the Chantry and being forced into Circles of Magi.
- Endless Legend has the Roving Clans faction, nomadic traders who build their cities on the backs of giant Setseke scarabs that can get up and move across the map.
- Final Fantasy XIV: The tribes of the Azim Steppe are traditionally nomadic, although the Dalamiq and Uyagir tribes have given up their nomadic lifestyle and established permanent settlements. The Dataq exaggerate their nomadic lifestyle by only staying for only hours at a time, sleep on their saddles, and only pitch tents in harsh rain.
- Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade and Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade: The nation of Sacae is home to numerous nomadic tribes primarily comprised of Horse Archers, such as the Kutolah tribe.
- Flight Rising: Fathoms circumnativate the globe, and have only recently settled in Sornieth to assist in finding the "cores" mentioned in Tidelord's final prophecy. Even still, they are unusued to anything but slow, unceasing movement and still choose to make their homes in places where they may continue, albeit in smaller circles than before.
- Grim Dawn: The Rhowari, colloquially known as Rovers, are a nomadic culture who travel throughout the entire world in what is essentially a neverending, lifelong pilgrimage. Their prophet, the First Traveler, was once King Rhowan of Arkovia, who was warned by a god that his lands would be struck with unavoidable doom due to their obsession with lands, titles, and showy belongings; Rhowan abdicated, renounced his lands, and walked away only with what he could carry, with the Rovers' predecessors doing the same and following him, leaving Arkovia and its remaining, skeptical denizens to their doom. Nowadays they're one of the more abundant post-Dawn factions, as their nomadic lifestyle has thoroughly prepared them for such an apocalyptic event.
- Lonely Wolf Treat: The wolves in Treat's pack build temporary homes out of snow and tear them down whenever they decide to move. They do this because they don't want other animals to settle near them.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon: The Seafolk are a seafaring people that spend most of their lives traveling the ocean aboard houseboats, with Seafolk Village being one of the places where they come to trade.
- Red Flood: Jacques Schweizer envisions a continent-wide society of nomads and travelers who live off the land.
- Six Ages: The Hyalorings as a whole are a downplayed example, in that their clans migrate frequently but remain in a given place for several generations before moving on in search of better lands and pastures. The Horizon Seekers, however, have never fully settled down, and have remained constantly on the move alongside their herds ever since Hylaor's people first left the lost city of Nivorah long ago.
- Stellaris: The Nomads expansion adds the titular Nomads option as a choice when creating an empire. Instead of settling on planets or even orbital habitats, Nomadic empires start on an Arkship, an enormous ship built around habitable modules, and can build further Arkships as they unlock the necessary technologies. Nomads can move between systems, building waystations that collect resources from the system around them and can be used to create trade networks in symbiosis with more traditional empires, or harvesting celestial deposits for larger influxes of materials (at the expense of depleting the deposit for a couple decades).
- Them's Fightin' Herds: Unlike most other races in Fœnum, the majority of the Cattlekind and Alpake clans don't live in a fixed location, and are always moving while living off the land within The Prairie and The High Plains, respectively.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Keves, Agnus, and the Nopon Caravans have no fixed location. The exceptions to this rule are Keves and Agnus Castle. Even the City, which appears to be a part of Swordmarch, can change location.
Webcomics
- Runaway to the Stars: The centaurs' homeworld is dominated by a huge ring-shaped supercontinent and is highly seasonal, with harsh winters and blistering summers that are particularly extreme at high latitudes. As such, centaurs are broadly split into two cultural categories: settled pastoralists, who live in the temperate-tropical isthmuses, and nomads, who travel endlessly around the continent's circuit in order to stay within the fertile and hospitable spring/fall zones and spend the winter/summer in the temperate latitudes. The ones that follow the summer to stay within the fall area are called sunchasers, while the ones that follow the winter to stay within the spring are the nightchasers. Despite being at opposite ends of the globe most of the time, the two groups maintain a mostly cohesive culture by means of messages and objects left behind at rest sites used by all nomads. Almost all centaurs to head offworld are from nomad clans and retain an itinerant lifestyle, and are referred to as starchasers.
Web Original
- Hamster's Paradise:
- The harmsters are the first sapient species to evolve on HP-02017 and are divided into four separate species. The most widespread of these are the savannah harmsters, who live a nomadic lifestyle due to them primarily feeding on large herding animals. One culture known as the Pyromaniacs have also had a very profound effect on the ecosystem due to their fire-based hunting strategy and nomadic lifestyle burning large swaths of land and leading to several extinctions and displacements.
- The Bruteriders, a culture descended from tundra-savanna hybrids after the tundra harmsters conquered the other harmster species, retained their ancestors' nomadic habits. Unlike the original savannah harmsters, they travel on the backs of large brutes and hammoths that allow them to move in much greater numbers.
- The Plainmanes, one of the calliducyon varieties that evolved long after the harmsters' extinction, are nomadic, which puts them in contrast to the other southhounds who are more territorial and stationary. This also means that they have frequent contact with other southhounds and know how to speak their languages.
- Serina:
- During the Ultimocene ice age, the pelagans are a culture of deep-water whaler daydreamers that nomadically circle Serina's equator, following pods of large aquatic animals that they hunt.
- The reapers, a species of sapient aukvultures that arose during the ice age-hothouse transition, spend their time wandering around the world and only stop at their caves to mate and raise their young.
- The slaughtersprinters live a nomadic lifestyle hunting prey on the plains of northern Serinaustra, as they would otherwise exhaust the populations of edible animals in a single given area.
- The boreal, central nomad, and unsettled steppe leucrocottas all live nomadic lifestyles on the dry, cold plains of Serinarcta in the late Ultimocene. The boreals and steppe tribes are hunters, while the central nomads move alongside their herds. The boreals in particular have developed a superstitious fear of settled life, due to how spending long amounts of time amongst more numerous sedentary populations can transmit livestock-borne diseases from them that their bodies aren't adapted for.
- SCP-3838 is a group of 8 nomadic tribes, which all occupy the same small space located in Turkmenistan. However, they possess the ability to travel through time, and thus each SCP-3838 instance occupies the land at a different point in history. SCP-3838 members treat different periods of time as if they are different areas of pastureland owned by one tribe or another; a specific period in the XIX century is used as a marketplace and as a place for inter-tribal councils and gatherings. SCP-3838 instances do not occupy their time period contiguously, but move to a different time within their period (forwards or backwards) every six months.
Western Animation
- Avatar Legends:
- Air Nomads have no fixed abode. While there are four air temples, the peaceful, meditative culture that held wisdom the world now mostly lacks, found value in traveling the world and meeting all types of people from all walks of life.
- The Legend of Korra: It's revealed that after defeating Ozai, Aang founded a group called the "Air Acolytes", composed of nonbenders who decided to follow the Air Nomad culture out of respect to him.
- Castlevania (2017): The Speakers are a group of traveling altruistic sages who always try to help people around them in spite of being constantly scapegoated by them. They are likely a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Romani and, to a lesser extent, of the Jews.
Real Life
- There are several real-world cultures that have been nomadic or otherwise wandering.
- The Romani, who have wandered from India all across Europe and Asia and even the Americas.
- In the time between the fall of Jerusalem in the 2nd century and the founding of Israel in the 20th century, the Jewish people have fit this trope to an extent. They found themselves scattered across Eurasia and occasionally expelled from different countries. Somewhat downplayed as they often lived in settled cities.
- The original Arabs from Neo-Assyrian times and before were a nomadic people, and traditionally shunned settled civilization. Some of them eventually decided to settle, but others never gave up their original way of life, thus becoming the first Bedouins.note
- The Eurasian Steppe, from ancient times to the early modern period, was nomad central, since the climate and ecology have historically made it very difficult to have permanent settlements. A lot of the famous groups that inspired the Hordes from the East trope - Turks, Huns, Mongols, Scythians, and the like - hailed from this region. Many of them established large, nomadic empires
that posed a challenge to their settled neighbours. However some of these groups (especially the Turks) would later become settled themselves.