Under this topic I will try to expand on the subject of nomadic cultures' afterlife on the planes: Their their culture, religion-gods, their realms, their effect on the planes. Since I am Turkish, this is a subject that I have a personal interst on. I have been intending to start this for sometime, but I could only read enough information to start today (just before my German test. great). You are free to give your opinion, critisisim and ideas, and if you have any extra info on the subject, please share.
After this quick entry I will start by these important points concerning the material,
1. SHAMANISM IS NOT A RELIGION. A common mistake. Apparently Russian Anthropoligists found traces of Shamanistic rituals on some of the remaining nomadic tribes, and thought that this was a full fledged religion back in the old days. While a form of shamanism was practiced among the peoples of Deserts, steppes and tundras of Asia, it was not a religion. It dealt with magic, spirits, curing illnesess,and telling prophecies. People who worked with spirits were called many names in many groups, a prominent one is Kam. He does not have clerical status.
2. ONE GOD. It seems that unlike almost all of their contemporaries, these people were not heterodoxal: In essence, they believed in a single god which creates/rules the world and the heavens. It is called Tengri, meaning sky. However, this belief was influenced by many of the diverse cultures they encountered, and sometimes developed(or degenerated) to heterodoxy. A theory is that, when the people are united under a pwerful state, the religion is mostly monotheist, however when the empire falls apart and the various large groups go on their way, heterodoxy grows. Since a monodeist approach is "no fun" in PS terms, I will also include some of the other, lesser, powers.
3. SPIRITS: Spirits are everywhere, and they pretty much are responsible from anything that happens to people. Now, I don't like the shaman/spirit world representations I have found on the canon material(I remember it being, oh, it doesn't exist but you think it does, you don't actually go there etc etc), but I guess that's what we have to work with. In 4th edition terms, I guess spirits live on the feywild or shadowlie according to their mood. Also, it is worth noting that it was believed that a man had three spirits (some times more).
4. ANCESTORS: Respect to the ancestors was of highest importance in these cultures. They beleived that their ancestors spirits (one of them, anyway) stayed on the earth to guide their descendants, help the Kams in their voyages to the spirit world, bring good luck, etc. They also believed in afterlife, so buried their dead with some of his wealth, sometimes his horse. They visited some of the more "holy" burial sites on certain times. It is said that Attila led a campaign to Balkans because tomb raiders there had desecrated their burial sites.
5. WOMEN: Women were productive members in an old nomadic society. They were subservient to men, but were in much better condition then in many places which treated women like slaves. Almost no repression, though you still shouldn't judge by todays standards. Female Kams existed, and the Hatun / Queen was second in power to the Khan.
5. LIFE IS HARD: Out on the mountais, steppes, tundras, deserts and wastelands that make up the majority of the central Asian homeland, life is hard. In places like Mongolia and Kazakhstan, daily temperature differences of 50 degrees are common. There are tribes on Syberia. You don't live there. You survive. While this makes everyone of your tribe a hardened, relentless survivor, the temptation of an easier life is strong. Many great Khans have led their armies to the greenlands of Eastern Europe and China, settling, founding great kingdoms, only to be assimilated and forgotten.
But in this topic, we are interested in the hardcore nomads. Those people who live by the code "horse, woman, weapon: mobility, reproduction and protection".
More to follow.
Uh, actually, Shamanism/animism is indeed a religion, and prettymuch what all of our religions started out as. It was/is used by man to explain his world (why is there lightning, why is there suffering, why do people die, etc.). It usually followed a moralistic system of natural law (e.g. suffering exists due to violating the laws of nature/the spirits of nature personified; here is also where reincarnation comes in to explain why people suffer when they've led good lives; clearly they did something bad in a previous one.) The deity or deities in shamanism/animism tend to be neither good nor evil, since they are direct personifications of nature itself, and usually embody paradoxial portfolios (e.g. earth deities personify fertility and nature's bounty, but also personify death by wild animals, death and the grave if the worshippers bury their dead. Sky deities usually personify rulership, vitality, and life-giving rain, but also personify famine and disease. Water deities usually personify life and fertility, but also personify floods, death, and destruction.)
""WOMEN: Women were productive members in an old nomadic society. They were subservient to men, but were in much better condition then in many places which treated women like slaves. Almost no repression, though you still shouldn't judge by todays standards. Female Kams existed, and the Hatun / Queen was second in power to the Khan.""
This was only out of pure necessity however, and shouldnt' be seen as some sort of altruistic advancement of women. In ALL societies where women became more than just property or slaves prior to the 20th century, it was solely because giving women property rights and political power was essential in order to protect the mens' property/political power while they were all gone hunting/warring 70-98% of the time. The misogyny of Semitic (semitic being Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) culture throughout known history (being the most famous example of women treated as slaves in their culture-- children too, for that matter) was due largely to the fact that they acquired agriculture and animal husbandry before written history, and thus the men didn't all have to spend 95% of their time hunting for food. In the case of the Spartans, the women only gained property rights and such in order to protect the mens' properties while they were away at war for years at a time. Whereas the Semitic peoples (at least during Biblical times) generally didn't go to war for more than weeks at a time.
On the subject of nomadic life on the Planes, you have to realize that not all of the rules you listed are going to apply.
1. Most (but not all-- genies are an exception to the rule, for example) outsider races lack religion and don't worship other creatures. They have an overall 'king', 'master', and 'patron' who rules their race and their plane, but they do not worship him/her/it.
2. Most outsider races do not require food in order to survive; they get their nourishment via the essence of their native plane (e.g. Baatezu acquire all the nourishment they need to grow and thrive from the Lawful and Evil essence of their plane)
3. While it appears as though all outsider races (even Modron and Inevitables, strangely) are capable of sexual reproduction, (and even sexual reproduction with mortals...!) in most cases this is not how members of their species are born. In fact, a nomadic lifestyle is incompatible with the survival of most outer planar races since their species are born primarily via 'processing factories' of petitioners; factories which require large-scale infrastructure and staffing to churn out new outsiders. We know this to be the case for Tanar'ri, Baatezu, Yugoloths, Modrons, and Inevitables.
4. A nomadic lifestyle in D&D is incompatible with the lawfully-aligned outsiders. This is because the nomadic and frontier lifestyles in D&D settings are universally considered a chaotic-aligned situation, or neutral aligned situation at most. Lawful creatures OTOH are always considered to be an element of civilization.
A nomadic lifestyle would be far more compatible with certain inner planar races (such as air elementals) than outer ones. However, this varies widely by inner plane; the social/behavioral nature of mephits and elementals of each element/paraelement/quasielement are different, and while all mephits and elementals tend towards true neutral, the various types tend to lean more towards one alignment or other (usually more towards chaos or law than good or evil). The elemental planes are also described largely as "untamed frontiers", so again the nomadic nature fits, though the Inner Planes book is quite emphatic that most (not all, but most) types of elementals and mephits build huge cities and such (the ooze paraelementals and ooze mephits if I remember correctly are all nomadic, however, and air elementals tend towards chaos due to the 'free spirited' and 'free roaming' nature of wind.) Each type also reacts differently to outsiders (as a general rule, most types don't like outsiders; salt quasielementals are a known exception to this as they love it when creatures full of tasty fluids wander into their plane. Mineral mephits and quasielementals tend to be the most xenophobic since travelers and wandering beasts almost invariably come with the intent of making off with or eating part of their home)