Zulgrin Wroth

Zulgrin Wroth are the warped descendants of wild boars touched by infernal bargains made in desperate villages or at blood-drenched crossroads. A ritual or cursed oath can twist a single boar into a Zulgrin, its body swelling, its mind sharpening into cunning malice and a taste for the living. Hunters and warbands sometimes ride them, but the beasts answer most strongly to those who carry actual brimstone-tied fetishes or the scent of blood and sin. These creatures favor broken, charred clearings at the edges of swamps and blasted moorland where corrupted springs steam and insects glow faintly in the fog. Local lore in places such as the ruined hold of Kor'Mel and the salt-black fen of Soronmar speaks of packs of Wroths driven by a lead sow or boar that returns annually to the place of its first corruption. The scholar Magister Edrin Hessel of the Ashbind Archive cataloged a dozen encounters, noting the beast's strange appetite for old iron and the way it sometimes drags its trophies to a pyre-like midden. Hunters who call themselves the Wayward Hound-Keepers claim to use iron-bound hounds to track Zulgrin, though they whisper the beasts sometimes turn on their own trackers when moonlight makes their eyes blaze.

An artist should show a boar of massive proportions—roughly the size of a human-beside doorway, shoulder height near a tall human's chest and bulked like a war pig. Its hide is cracked and pitted, like heat-riven leather and cooled obsidian, with coarse bristles that stand on end and spark faintly at the tips. Eyes are small but extremely bright, a molten red orb in each socket. Tusks curve outward and upward, stained black along the edges as if forged and quenched in blood; the bases are wrapped with scorched ligatures or infernal iron studs. Hooves are split and clawlike, with wicked ridges; each strike throws up hot embers. Breath should be conveyed as a faint smoky haze with tiny flickers of flame. Small scorch marks on nearby stones, half-melted iron rings hooked into the skin, and tufts of singed fur emphasize the fiendish origin. The expression is less animal and more furious intelligence—snarling, with flared nostrils wreathed in steam.