NPC - Bovine the Bloody

Bovine the Bloody

This dour warrior from the north is relatively young to command the respect and leadership of his warband. Personally he has over 180 men and women sworn to him, 3 longships worth, but as many as 8 longships have accompanied him on his southern raids. His crews are well experienced and doughty warriors but there is always a leavening of new warriors to replace those lost during raiding season. At least 30 of  his followers, normally 10 per ship, will be raw recruits between the ages 14 and 16 while another 60 or so will have only 1 or 2 raiding seasons under their belt.

Of the remaining 90 or so men Bovine has two ship-leaders and a half-dozen heroes of his own standing while the bulk of the men are experienced warriors between the ages of 18-30 with a few greying oldesters in their 30's who somehow have not been chosen by the Raven King to swell his ranks in the next life.

While most of his men are normal axe and sword wielding warriors, a small group are priests of the bear-cult. These men disdain the use of armor and weapons and some take on the form of monstrous bears in battle. It is said that normal weapons do them no lasting harm or even recoil from their flesh. A number of skalds also accompany Bovine's small host. These poet-magician-priests are said to be in service of the Raven King and practice healing arts, enchantments, wizardry and even martial skills though not to the same degree as those purely wielding spear, axe or sword.

A small contingent of bowmen are aboard each ship. It is not a favored weapon of war among northerners but Bovine has among his ranks a renowned bowman from the west of the Island of Ghosts and he has trained those among Bovine's followers in the way of the Longbow. About a score of these warriors are bowmen and half-a-dozen of those coming on their first raid are apprenticed.

Among these warriors about 1/3 are swordwomen. They sale aboard a single longship and fight as a single group. They are lead by Hodra, Bovine's wife, and she is one of his two Ship-leaders. While skalds are all male, there are 3 Sedkona among Hodra's ship. These wise-woman carry staves that they use in battle both as a physical weapon but also as an item imbued with magical power. There are also a group of swordswomen, perhaps a dozen among the three-score, who know the ways of the Vol, a healing art that is similar to that practiced among the Skalds.

The heroes who follow Bovine are from various clans and tribes in the north but there are 3 dark-skinned warriors, a father and two sons, who journeyed on some quest to the far north, a wild red-haired warrior from the mountains in the north of the Ghost Land. a skald from the western islands, and even a warrior from the old empire in the southern lands who wears strange green-bronze armor and seems to know every weapon created by man.

Wormy Reference Guide - Dragon #16

Summary:

Frank and Dudly have taken on the job, for dwarfburgers, to protect Irving and his barbecue stand from a rowdy group of customers, mainly goblins and rat (or is it a wererat) lead by a Wereboar who has taken exception to being called a wart-hog. One good crunch on the head and it is a free dwarfburger for Frank and lights-out for the lichen-throat.

References:

Dudly:
He his busy eating his Dwarfburger and lets his buddy Frank handle the Wereboar,

Dwarfburgers:
A tasty barbecue sandwich made by Irving from dragon-stumped dwarves.

Frank:
Makes good use of his club and knocks out the Wereboar in one blow.

Goblins:
Some of Irving's most enthusiastic Dwarfburger customers.

Irving:
His nose is put a bit out-of-joint by Wereboar for calling the lichen-throat a Wart-Hog

Lichen-Throat:
Frank's name for Were-creatures

Rat:
A lone Rat in the crowd of Goblins hungry for Dwarfburgers (or is he a Lichen-Throat?)

Wart-Hog:
What Irving calls the Wereboar

Wereboar:
A lichen-throat who doesn't take kindly to being called a Wart-Hog

Magic Item - The Stone Heads of Messerschmidt

In the great city-state of Ptolemides magic and those who wield it are as much artists as they are scholars or mystics and perhaps no one was greater at his craft than the mad sculptor-magician Messerschmidt. During his day the College of Wizards was a powerful organization and they held sway over all branches of the mystical field of study in a way that has not been seen again since.

Messerschmidt was a genius, but he had little truck with his fellow practitioners and this cost him dearly. The elders of College would not brook insolence let alone the complete disregard that Messerschmidt held them in and in a single much regretted night they smashed his studies, slew his wives and myriad children and thought to destroy the artist-wizard himself, but Messerschmidt had transported himself away to a nearby quarry to view the soul in the stone he sought for his next work. When he returned his tower was a burned out abattoir.

Over the next year Messerschmidt decimated the College of Wizards. The elders, staff and many of its students became the 'work' of the sculptor and instead of rendering stone into works of art and magic he rendered magicians into stone and artifacts of power.

There are dozens of these stone heads still in existence. They are the souls of mighty dweomencrafters frozen into paroxysms of emotion. Each alone benefits its possessor, acting as guardians most often, voicing alarms, summoning spells and creatures as they might have in life. The more that are brought together the more powerful they become.

A single head will act as a magic mouth unless the name of the magician whose soul is trapped within the stone is known. Then the head will be able to cast a single first level spell as if it were a first level magic-user. If the possessor of the head is also a magic-user they themselves will be granted the casting of an extra 1st level spell at 1st level once per day if they are within 100feet of the head.

With every extra stone head in possession the level and ability of the heads and the possessor increases by one. Two stone heads act as a single 2nd level mage and grant the same to the possessor of the heads within the 100 foot radius of this enchantment's reach. Through the years there has been a constant struggle to gain as many of these stone heads as possible. Many have been lost though whether they actually be destroyed is not known.

It is rumored that each head possesses unique abilities as well as curses and the number of heads is rumored to grow if used too often or if too many are gathered together. A wizard may possess twelve of these stone heads only for his apprentices to find thirteen come morning and no master to be found.

Magic Item - The Horned Helms of Toszar Khan

Toszar Khan is the name the Wildmen of the North give to a Shaman-King from their distant past. The people of the more civilized Southlands know little of him. He ruled a vast empire and united the North from the Shores of the Ice seas and the blue-painted savages that now inhabit the northern highlands of the isle of Ghosts to the endless eastern plains of ice and snow that the Reindeer People drift across in their colorful and luxurious caravans and whose command of the elements keeps them safe from their dangerous cousins and outlanders who would ravage them.

That Toszar Khan ruled a vast city of stone older than the memory of man is undisputed. The broken towers and weed-choked streets can be found half-sunken into the Ice Marsh close to the edge of the great north wall the Southerns built to stem the tide of northern raids.  Toszar Khan raised the city from the marsh, supported its foundations of the backs of summoned elementals of stone and earth, and at his death by the sword of the hero Culen Fairhair it sank once again into its chilly slumber.

But during the time of the shaman-king the old chieftains were dragged from their barrows and adorned with the horned helms of Toszar Khan. These were his warleaders, his strongest guardians and the greatest shame of his people who honored the dead and their dead heroes most of all.

Three of these helmed corpses have survived the death of the shaman-king. Most often they can be found in the old city of stone Zar-Kelen within the broken ziggurat where Toszar Khan was slain, but they often travel to and dwell within their own violated barrows to the north and east of the city.

Once their had been a score of the helmed servants but now only three remain.

The Bear, the oldest of the three. His helm is topped with the skull of a bear and his face masked by a cross of bronze, His body is marked with the old symbols of his achievements and power. He was a shaman-king himself and he wields unholy magic as well as martial power. His helm not only animates his cold, dead flesh (as it all the helms will do) it allows him to summon the spirits of dead beasts to fight for  and serve him,

The Corpse-King, he is seen here between his fellows. The youngest and one of the last chieftains who was honored with a barrow before the old ways were abandoned during the years of the great plague and the burning of the dead began. His flesh is unmarked, though a sickly cold green-blue with the dark-slime that runs through his body instead of blood same as his brethren, and his helm is graven with the markings from the old pre-human foundations of the city, and his face masked by the bronzed breast-bones of a man. He is the most skilled with weapons of his brethren fighting with a southern longsword in one hand and a short-sword from the old southern empire in the other. He can summon all those he kills to fight for him though their bodies rot quickly and within a week collapse into a pile of putrid flesh and bones. Animals detest him and flee from him. Animal dead will attack him on sight unless controlled by his brethren.

The Ram. His fleshed is inscribed with the marks of a chain. Once he was enslaved by the Southerns and fought in their arena of death. Somehow he returned to the north and claimed leadership among the outlaws and bandits of the northern mountains. His helm has the skull of a ram upon it and he can summon the elementals of earth and stone to serve him. His resting place was a barrow of stone at the foot of the first mountain in the north and it is rumored that great treasures were buried within him but deep within the mountains roots, protected by all those The Ram defeated in combat, from the south to the shaggy mountain tribesmen of the far north to great beasts and monsters that few other encountered and lived to tell the tale.

Wormy Reference Guide - Dragon #15

Summary: Wormy at play - Backgammon this time.

References;

Wormy:
He's here and playing backgammon at a very ornate board courtesy of Tramp.

White Dwarf #9 Molten Metal

Just half a page this issue and not much to show. Sculpts seem generally poor across the board and even the naked cavorting witches from Miniature Figurines fail to rouse the spirit of this offering. It is hard to judge scale but the Frost Giant examples seem a bit small and even the Balrog with sword and whip appears a bit thin and awkward.

White Dwarf - Phoenix Model Development - The Bolg

I was really impressed with Phoenix Games Lost World of Bare-Nekked Lassies from a previous White Dwarf. I can't say the same for the Bolg. It looks like some kind of oompa-lumpa from a version of Willy Wonka with John Saxon playing the lead. The diorama looks like something out of the special effects from an episode of Star Trek (Is that Spock with a battle-axe in the lower corner?) I can hear the waa-waa-was music of dying alien space witches from another dimension just looking at this picture. Maybe they grow on you.