Bagnar (Mutated Mondays)

Bagnar is old. He remembers the way it all was before. At least he thinks he recalls something of the way it used to be, way back when. But he's old. His memory isn't what is used to be. Neither is the world, but that's another matter.

He distrusts day-light and only moves around at night. His eyes work better without all that loud glare and hot noise from the sun. Years of nocturnal scavenging have given his scaly skin a pale, washed-out appearance. Like petroleum jelly or canning wax left too close to the wood stove.

Armed with his venerable jabby-stick and a well-earned reputation for being incredibly ornery when he's treated uncharitably, Bagnar wanders about the Old Places, rotting about in the ruins and salvaging all sorts of rubbish and junk, mot of which he tinkers with and eventually crafts into various tools, contraptions or weapons.

Those who get on his good side can barter, trade or even buy some of the things Bagnar has cobbled together. He also has forgotten more about the local region than most others will ever know, unfortunately, he really has forgotten it all. But every now and again, when he's in a particularly good mood or someone gets him talking about his younger days, sometimes Bagnar remembers things no one else ever knew...things that could make the right person or persons rich...maybe...

Some of Bagnar's Trade Appropriate Thingmabobs

1. A bicycle built for three, with three swiveling weapons-mounts.
2. A self-inflating raft that has been modified to extract hydrogen from available water and use it to float like a blimp. A very explosive blimp.
3. Twin mortars, welded onto a frame meant to be strapped onto a very large rodent. The rat died a few years back. It was a good rat in a fight.
4. Voice-activated wrench-set. Metric.
5. Lamp on tripod. It strobes black light. He doesn't remember why he did that.
6. Folding sheet-metal bins that collapse into flat panels that can then be rolled into cylinders for storing them until needed. Somehow the things get smaller and lighter as they roll-up. If rolled the wrong way, they get larger and heavier.
7. Modified air-pump now shoots dart the better part of half a mile. Not terribly accurate, but it can put a hole in something that gets close-up.
8. Grappling hook that actually grapples on command. It doesn't release right away, sometimes it takes three tries to get it to let go. But that's a minor glitch.
9. Six boxes of parts for a still he was building for Gomphrey, only the scurrilous punk never did come back with whatever it was he had promised me to build the darned thing. (This took place many years ago, back when Gomphrey was still a young adventurer. See Ten Short Adventures Set 1 for more about Gomphrey.)
10. A heavy set of pipes, tubes and cannisters welded and duct-taped onto a two-wheel hand-truck. This is a combination flame-thrower, scent diffuser, humidifier and chemical sprayer. It's fully loaded. The guy who commissioned it never picked it up. You can have it if you'll just get it out of the way.

A Few of Bagnar's Tall Tales and Recollections

1. Bagnar recalls 3 random things about one particular hex on a map he has laying around his workspace. You can have the map. (Determine hex randomly)
2. One of his old journals details the annual migration paths of several species of migratory creatures, including certain nomadic humanoids and mutants, all of it logged over the course of 5d20 years in cramped, tiny hand-written notes. There are pictures. He's open to making a trade for this journal.
3. The old tinker takes down a massive thigh-bone converted into a map-case. Inside is a map picked-out on a sheet of expertly tanned and still supple Pigmen hide. The map details a major Pigmen enclave and denotes handy things such as weapons caches, larders, prisoner-pits, fuel dumps, and so on. The only catch is that Bagnar doesn't recall off-hand where exactly this particular Pigmen encampment is any more.
4. Did I ever tell you about the time I single-handedly caught a Radiation Whale (MF p. 91) using only a piece of candy and three feet of dental floss?
5. Suddenly Bagnar recites the recipe for compounding a powerful defoliant that is deadly to Pumpkin Men (MF p.90), and other such plant menaces. He repeats the recipe three times in a sing-song voice then promptly forgets it.
6. There is a blue-speckled herb that grows up in the high country West of here. If you boil it down and mix the liquid with some good, fatty oils, like rendered Sand Whale blubber say, this stuff makes a salve that repels Mansquitoes (MF p.82)  better than just about anything, short of a flame-thrower. He'll draw you a picture if you like, but he has a few photographs stuck in his cookbook, if he remembers.
7. Kudzu-Curare works wonders in terms of paralyzing Fishmen (MF p.72)  if you cut it into one-foot sections and toss it into the water over their nesting sites. Course the stuff is juicy and messy and will paralyze you just as good if you don't pay attention to what you're doing. If you mix it with candle wax and well-chewed gum or maybe some lard in a pinch, it can be slathered onto your edged weapons. It'll keep for a few days, long as you keep out of the rain.
8. He has recipes for boiling-down a Black Pudding (MF p.62) and for pickling the heart-stalks of Brain Plants (MF p. 64) that he swears by. He used to win cooking contests back in the day. Which is a good way to infiltrate some of the local settlements hereabouts. They might shoot you most days, but if you let them know you're there to challenge their cooks to a cook-off, well, you had best be darn sure of your culinary capabilities. If you can at least make a respectable showing, like say second place, you might have a whole bunch of newfound friends. Just stay out of the walled-towns down along the Green River. They aren't so picky about what meat they put in their pots, if you know what I mean.
9. Heard tell a few years back, a young girl from the Deep Woods, figured out how to tame herself a family of Casteroids (MF p. 65). Those mischievous beasts got her into all sorts of places. She keeps to herself these days. Built a bunker of sorts out past the big lake. What was her name again...
10. There's a way to get rid of the Burrow Tuber (MF p. 64)...but it involves raw eggs, pumpkinseed oil and something else. Tastes like paint thinner mixed with sheep spit, but it does the trick. (He'll eventually remember if not badgered).
11. Saw a crazy light in the sky a few weeks back. Several of them in fact. But this one. Well, it crashed back in the hills maybe two-three miles away. I haven't had time to go check it out yet. Maybe you'd like to go take a look?
12. Mants (MF p. 82) can't handle their liquor, and smoke puts them to sleep just like bees. Just make darn sure you aren't anywhere near when they do wake up. they are fiercely bad waker-uppers. A little kerosene mixed with sheep manure will foul-up their sense of smell better than a dozen cannisters of tear gas. Funny thing is that when you mess up their sense of smell, they can't talk to one another hardly at all. A lot of their language is chemical-based. Or so it seems to my recollection.

Bagnar
No. Enc.: Unique
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120' (40')
Armor Class: 4 (Custom armor)
Hit Dice: 12
Attacks: 1 (Jabby-Stick or mutation)
Damage: 3d6 or See Below
Save: L12
Morale: 12

Mutations: Extra Parts (new organs), Increased Vision (night sight), Increased Touch, Natural Armor (scaly-skin), Quick Mind, Regenerative Capability (10 hp/day). Drawbacks: Bizarre Appearance (scales, colorless-ness), Light sensitivity, Memory Loss, Nocturnal.

Bagnar's new organs coupled with his regeneration capability have rendered him semi-immortal. Unfortunately his memory is spotty and inconsistent.

Wermilok

"Slick, oily and smooth they slither through their tunnels arranging ingenious traps for those unwary folk who trod all unknowingly upon their chosen territory..."

Malgramar The Xenosophist

Wermilok
(Mutant Nematodes)
No. Enc.: (1d4)
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120' (40')
Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 7
Attacks: 2 (Weapons, Contact Toxins)
Damage: Weapon, 1d8+Poison
Save: L4
Morale: 9
Hoard Class: Low End Loot

Mutations: Aberrant Form (arms), Chameleon Epidermis (Limited: hide in shadows 70%, can partially-shift from gray to one other color selected at random), Dermal Poison Slime, Gigantism (humanoid-sized).

(30% chance of 1 additional Mental Mutation or Drawback)

Descendants of free-living nematodes, Wermiloks most often consume algae, fungi, small animals, and fecal matter. Occasionally they will devour dead organisms, acting as undertakers and scavengers at the same time, much like ghouls, whom they dislike intensely due to their long-standing competition as rival waste-mongers and corpse-gatherers in the four great Citystates of the Sunset Coast. Wermiloks within the Four Citystates make a great fuss and bother about observing all the proper and required rituals, maintaining excellent standards of hygiene and propriety, and respectfully handling the dead with all due honor and decorum. If anything they are even more fastidious and punctilious than their rivals who suffer from a lingering reputation as grave robbers and despoilers of the dead based upon historical records and the shuddersome accounts and lurid tales of those abdead individuals who have sought damages through the courts. There may have been some Wermilok money behind some of these grotesque legal proceedings, but that has never been proven. The Wermiloks of the four Citystates pride themselves on being civilized and productive members of society who fulfill a very necessary function which they choose to see as a sacred obligation.

It is also worth noting that the Wermiloks do not exclusively dispose of dead bodies, like the ghouls. They collect and process all trash, rubbish, and waste-products of any and every sort, kind or type...for a small, nominal fee, of course. Some of this stuff they feed-upon, others they recycle, salvage or break down into usable materials. Wermiloks possess an innate genius for restoration, refurbishing and recycling cast-off things. They also are among the most driven to learn everything they can about the old technologies, to study anything they can get hold of that came from the times preceding the Big Burn, with one notable exception; Wermilok elders earnestly and fervently deny any knowledge regarding sorcery, magic or witchcraft. But some have begun to suspect that perhaps they proclaim their innocence in such matters just a bit too strenuously to be taken seriously.

The Wermiloks maintain deeply burrowed archives, museums and workshops few outside of their genome have ever seen. It is in these well-hidden and protected places that they conduct all manner of experiments with old tech and entirely new inventions as well. They salvage and study the past as a prelude to the future, and of all the peoples of the re-industrialized regions it is the Wermiloks who sponsor the most innovators, inventors and experimenters no matter how crack-pot, mad or potentially blasphemous their ideas might be.

Wermiloks are masters of setting deadfalls, digging various types of pit traps and the like.  They prefer ambushing their enemies and are notorious in their devious use of traps over any sort of direct confrontation but they are by no means cowardly. Typical Wermilok burrows are arranged with dozens of looping sub-passages, crawlspaces, secret tunnels and so on, making it possible for a few dedicated Wermilok warriors to decimate even large groups of intruders or trespassers. Very few would-be despoilers have ever survived to return from attempted raids upon the underground domains of the Wermiloks. This is a matter of quiet pride among the elders of the Wermiloks, but they do not speak of it in public for fear of encouraging ever rasher, ever more desperate or despicable types to try their luck.

There are adventuresome members of the Wermilok folk who are not satisfied with the conditions imposed upon their kind within the Four Citystates. These nonconformist Wermiloks often hire out as tunnel-fighters, sappers or siege engineers (at double or triple normal rates, depending upon reputation/experience).

Wermilok Secretions

Wermiloks secrete a sticky mucus-like substance that they use to bond earth together so as to reinforce the walls of their tunnels and burrows. Some urban-dwelling groups of Wermiloks have gone into business making bricks or working with cement, plaster and adobe-type building materials. The mucus-substance that they secrete is also highly toxic (when still fresh and wet) to non-Wermiloks, causing those failing a Save to rapidly purge their systems of salt, suffering 7d6 damage (Class 7 Poison/Save=half damage). They sometimes sell small, sealed containers of this stuff to select clientele.

Wermiloks also combine their mucus with honey and other ingredients to treat small boards that they then set-out to poison and petrify vermin such as rats. Just another service they offer. A few artistically-minded entrepreneurs among them have begun to creatively pose and arrange various types of vermin that they then treat with their proprietary mucus-blend in order to create whimsical or bizarre pseudo-statues through their taxidermy-like new art. It has only just begun to catch on as something of a fad among the consorts and concubines of certain of the Warlord's higher ranking officers and supporters.

The 'Other' Wermiloks...

Some of the more savage Underwaste tribes of Wermiloks have developed a taste for devouring the living tissues of victims whom they keep alive for as long as possible while they dine upon their limbs, faces and/or guts. This is thankfully a rare, if strikingly sadistic deviation from the norm, or so say the few scholars that have studied the hordes of reclusive, xenophobic mutant-barbarians of the Underwastes. Warlords have been known to hire-on outcasts from these particular  tribes to serve as torturers. Their reputations often undo recalcitrant prisoners without ever having to touch them.

There are increasingly lurid and unsavory rumors concerning tribes of Wermiloks out past the Bad Lands that have learned how to control Burn Leeches and domesticate Giant Leeches for use as guard-beasts. Bad Lander Wermiloks tend to have 1-2 additional Physical Mutations, usually Aberrant Form (Multiple Arms), Natural Weapon (Stinger), or Dual-Headed, though there are other types from time to time. These tribes are also reputed to be led by shamans who exhibit one or more major Mental Mutations and possibly spell-use...

A more radically mutated offshoot/sub-species of Wermilok, much larger and equipped with axolotl-like gills, have been reported by explorers who've only just returned from the Southern Rainforests.

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