Deep in the Crypt, on old and crippled figure tends to a rusty cauldron at the end of the cavern bare. We watch for a while.
He moves around, distinct, erratic. He pulls a collar bone from a lonely corpse, raps it twice on side of pot, smiles at the hollow sound and throws it into the bubbling soup. He takes a flask from his waste, uncorks it and takes a long, exaggerated sniff before adding a pinch of powder to his concoction.
As he works, he sings. It without tune or melody and is pure cacophony.
The cauldron gasps as it boils. The steam is thick and milky, but still half translucent, catching the light of low fire and refracting it about the room. Droplets of it gather on the ceiling’s stalactites, congeals in enormous bulbs and then fall onto the floor, gathering in sticky pools.
We don’t like the look of the ragged, half-dead fella, nor trust the chemics he’s brewing, so Dellius buries an arrow in his back. After he slumps down onto the floor, we head in the cavern, looking for scraps.
MacDoulan takes a fool’s move. He reckoned he saw something moving inside the pot, so sticks his spear in it. A boiled leathery hand grasps the shaft with unholy might and pulls it to the goop, along with McDoulan.
Two more of us died before we could bring the boiled thing down.
Pot garblers are the results of bizarre experimentation by Cryptlords, necromancers and heathen cultists. When producing an army of the living dead, sometimes constructs of bone are not enough and their master demands beasts of flesh and blood for service.
The necromancers weaves flesh from a potion concoction, sews on it on to a revenant and places it to boil in a potion full of glue until it sets.
The creature is in great and terrible pain until the process is complete, as the steaming glue seers the bones and turns the flesh to leather.
It takes weeks or even months to finish a pot-garbler and the final beasts is a zombie without compare whose flesh is not rotting but keen and terrible muscle, a leathering skin that cannot be pierced by spear or arrow.
While in this state, the garbler is vulnerable. It can’t see while in the pot and sits silently and in intense pain until the process is complete. If disturbed, it pulls itself from its fleshy womb with a great and terrible moan, still drooping in half-set glue, to consume whatever broke its incubation state.
To find out more about Pot-garblers and the other terrible creatures the Crypdiggers fight, keep an eye out for my upcoming RPG, Best Left Buried
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