Hrungul¶
Hrungul is a warhammer-and-shield wielding cleric of Torag. He always wears heavy armor that covers his entire body.
Quintessentially, Hrungul is a goblin raised in a dwarven temple to Torag. He was brought up with the belief that dwarfhood is not essentially related to being a of the dwarven race, and therefore believes himself to be fully a dwarf. He also understand this is not a common belief in practice, so he wears his heavy suit of armor at all times to obscure his features. While he does not outwardly lie about being a “biological” goblin, he avoids and obfuscates within strict technical boundaries of truth.
Hrungul is young, eager, and idealistic in his outlook and out to prove himself in the world. He tries to comport himself always within the strictures of the code that was imbued into his in the dwarvish temple.
Backstory¶
Hrungul was trained in a religious academy of sorts. It was a temple school whose master by the name of Gunnar took it upon himself to improve dwarf society by imbuing members of what dwarves might consider barbaric races with the values of dwraven culture. They are taken from their own homes at very young ages and then inducted into the cult of Torag, educated in dwarven lore and history, and trained in the most valued skills amongst Highelm dwarves: crafting and fighting.
Hrungul himself was taken from the charred ruins of a goblin village devastated in a raid. He remebers very little of this, both due to his extreme young age as well as the trauma of the proceedings. He does not remeber who his parents were, where the village was, or even who conducted ther raid. He only remebers glimpses of a genocidal horror.
Having been tranferred from that extremity to the relative comfort of a well appointed temple in the center of the wealthiest of dwarven metropolies, he felt nothing but gratitude towards Gunnar, whom he perceives as an adpoted father and the greatest dwarven thinker of all time, with a naive ferocity of one who was liberated. He emulates Gunnar in all he does, down to minute mannerisms to the best of his ability.
Gunnar named Hrungul, as he did all students at the academy, with a weighty historical name from dwarven history. And so, Hrungul was named after Hrungul Ironeye, a leader of a dissdent dwarven faction who was defeated by High Kind Taargick and subsequently joined the legendary dwarven sovereign a year before the great Quest for Sky was completed in -4987 AR. Gunnar thought this name was apt for an outsider to the dwarves who could become a true dwarf, and Hrungul did his best not to squander such expectations.
Hrungul did his best ot acquit himself well in his education and values the teachings he received. He perceives himself as a full-fledged dwarf, having followed all the practices and rituals of dwarfdom throughout his life. That is not to say that Hrunul was accepted by his adopted kinfolk. The student’s of what the local’s termed as Gunnar’s Folly were an object of frequent derision with very few exceptions. Hrungul quickly learned that having been brought up in dwarven culture, he had no trouble fitting in as long as he succesfully obscured his green skin, his razor-sharp goblin teeth, and his burning red eyes. He has taken to wearing armor everywhere he went and trying to blend in that way. He even made some tentative friends, at least for a while, while his ruse worked.
In that way Hrungul was one of only a few of Gunnar’s succesful experiments. While the school was not aiming to be unkind, it tried to erase the young pupils’ prior backgrounds at all cost. Hence, many a youth found themselves, especially those who had not had Hrungul’s advantage of being taken in without prior memories of their previous lives felt alienated from both their tutors as well as the dwarven society their tutors as well as the dwarven society at large. This led to frequent personal rebellions. These included anything from secretly partaking in learning the histories and traditions of the young students’ home cultures, to escapes, both theorized and executed, and sometimes to open conflict between students and staff, ending in violenty expulsion.
Hrungul only ever partook in illicit practices once. A fellow student, a young boy’s crush, has convinced him to join the circumspect meetings of a secret club meeting in the temple’s catacombes, where he learned to read and speak the language of his own people, after a fashion, and where he learned a view of the goblins that differed from the unflattering versions he had read about from dwarven scholars. This left him with unresolved conflicting views about what constitutes value in a culture, believing both in the superiority of dwarven custom and the inherent value of all civilizations striving to be.
The club was eventually found and dismantled. Hrungul’s crush disappeared in the aftermath, it being believed that she managed to escape. Hrungul’s involvement was never uncovered and he never attempted anything as risky in his following years at the temple.
Eventually he graduated and set out into the world to prove the worth of Gunnar’s great experiment. As an adventurer he was tasked to fight for Torag, order, and the dwarven ways, and to make a name for himself, and thus for the academy, one day to return to Highhelm shrouded in glory and blazing a trail for the future inclusion of goblins and other races into dwarven culture.
Otari¶
Thus, Hrungul arrived in Otari full of vigor to prove himself. Not only that, but finally he could use in practice all those skills he so meticulously learned at temple. Years of hefting the warhammer, a cumbersome but deadly weapon, and the holy symbol of Torag at once would soon come into fruition.
Still fresh off the boat, Hrungul found a mission for a disconcerting lady to delve into the ruins of an ominous local lighthouse to uncover what secrets lie within. He also encountered a local innkeeper, whose son’s disappearance might have a connection with that mysterious building and the marshes nearby. A grim event to be sure, but this chance to prove his mettle excited Hrungul. It seemed like an appropriate first step on the road to glory and fame in the name of his master’s legacy.
The mission also bound him to a freshly minted crew of adventurers. The team consisted of Xatar, a mighty lizard warrior seeking fortune away form his home swamp whose skill with his swords is matched only by his silent composure, Jack Marrow, a mysterious masked figure with a deadly blade and a confusing propensity to collect bones, and Sarkpawn, a kobold virtuoso of the bowl drum, and a deadly shot with the humble pebble. Hrungul was not sure what to expect out of a team of non-dwarf adventurers and his experiences at the academy has thought him to be openminded towards other cultures and personalities. Even if they do insist on talking to skeletons.
Otari Ruins¶
As the adventurers entered the ruins they found it to have becoma a keep of a burgeoning Mitflit fiefdom, whose king went as far as to bread warbeasts within the keep . The little blue gremlins turned out to be hostile though, which lead to many battles, such as the ones Hrungul has always imagined throughout all his days of training. He acquited himself with his warhammer, laying out many a mitflit. He also found uses for his training in tactics as the team moved from one old chamber to another, clearing them of hostile beasts and other denisens of the self-styled mitflit kingdom.
Amidst the fighting Hrungul always tried to honor his foes. He sees the fallen mitflit guards as valued warriors and consecrates them with respect when they fall to their arms. When they encountered lost kobold souls, he also did his best to lay them to rest.
He also managed to get an unfortunate first experience fo combat medicine when Xatar was brought down by a horrid beast bred by the mitflit king, for who knows what purpose. Hrungul lept to action to bring the mighty lizard warrior back from the brink of death and patch him up to a fighting shape.
Hrungul also saw many a strange sight amidst the ruins, the strangest of which was a staircase with a bizzare pool of blood, appearing as if on the other side of a magical mirror. And “magical” is the right word, as the entire construct pulsated with arcane energy.
All was progressing well. The crew managed to assault the throne room of the mitflit king and depose him. Even convincing the remaining subject to join their cause, at least briefly, and provide information about what the remainder of the building holds and the going on of the unground world beneath.
But then tragedy struck. The crew encountered a temple adorned with enormous stained glass windows and as they approached the alter, they were accosted by two animated bodies. The adventurers fought them off bravely, but as the flesh of their assailants was defeated, their restless spirits continued the assault by entering other corpses found nearby, and thus overwhelming the party. Amidst the fightiting Xatar and Hrungul both fell, but while Hrungul was resuscitated by the valiant efforts of Sarkpawn the imprompty kobold healer, Xatar succumbed eventually. Worse still, his body was among those the vile apparitions used as their meaty puppets to attack the adventuring heros. In the end. In the end, Jack’s dashing swordwork saved what remained of the party. The party then slunk back to town to to give burial to fallen Xatar at the local cemetary, lick their wounds and grieve at the inn.
The happenings of that day had an impact on Hrungul. His heroic moments fighting mitflits are overshadowed by feelings of grief and guilt. He feels responsible for the death of his new friend, since he did not have power enough to heal him in time and the wherewithall to aid him in combat without being downed himself. His enthusiasm for adventure has very quickly worn out. He still has a mission for glory, to prove his mentor right, but this is not a game, and people can die if they all, and Hrungul in specific, are not prepared for what they might encounter.
But that’s not the only thought haunting Hrungul’s thoughts. As the night darkens and the lighthouse lights up in the distance though the inn’s windows, he realizes they left the little upstart mitflit kingdom a wreck. Together they committed a little genocide of something new and still indistinct. But who knows what that kingdom would have become given time? Perhaps a little pocket of mitflit civilization would have risen from it given the room to find its identity. Destroying its chances is counter to Hrungul’s intrinsic system of values and something he will seek to atone for in his way. The first step to that is to rebuild the throne room as a tomb to the little mitflit kingom. Hrungul plans to turn the chamber into a columbarium for the fallen mitflits over time, and to rebuild the king’s throne as a monument.
I stopped taking significant notes at this point.