In its last decades the cruel lords of fallen Bergolast made many enemies but all feared to march upon the City of the Tarrasque for eating of the meat of the great beast had made its people fearless in battle. However, one brave hero volunteered to face its might alone.
This brave soul was taken to a cavern deep under the earth and set within a great sorcerous mechanism. There the hero’s flesh was preserved and replicated many times over and on the night of the new moon an army of these replicants was conveyed to the surface and marched upon Bergolast, where it was slaughtered.
Undeterred, the mechanism sent another army and another and another and still today on each new moon an army appears out of the night air in the Gibbing Hills (38.26) and marches. But they are not the company of brave heroes that they once were. They emerge into the world naked and gibbering with wild eyes mad with fury and lacking all understanding. Each holds a single long bronze knife in its hands and attacks any creature it meets with clumsy flailing blows.
If not killed for sport by bands of gnolls, the gibberlings march through the Burning Lands hacking to pieces anything that cannot escape them until they die of hunger, thirst or exhaustion. Their course can easily be charted by the flocks of vultures that fly above them (38.27) waiting to feast on their corpses. The gnolls als
o pick over them, as their bronze knives are a rare source of metal in the mineral-poor Burning Lands. This is often an occasion for squabbling between various gnollish clans, which the dwarves (31.27) sometimes take advantage of by marching in to claim the monthly crop of blades for themselves.
Hooks:
- Who was the hero who is the template for the gibblings?
- Is that hero still alive and insane locked down in a cave somewhere? Where?
- Why is the gibberling army still sent ever new moon, so many years after the fall of Bergolast?
- Is it possible to catch a gibberling and cure its madness? What would it have to say? Has anyone done this?