About Stealer of SongsNINTH BATTALION RIVAL: Stealer of Songs
SQ bardic performance X rounds / day, bardic knowledge (+1 all knowledge checks, can use knowledge skills untrained), countersong, distraction, inspire courage +1, poison use
* Dark Sign – a unique and rudimentary sign language used by Stealer of Songs and her ‘little men’ to communicate in battle without using words that could be overheard.
The Dark Stalker and her crew, known to the dwarves of the Ninth Battalion as ‘Soot Black, and her Seven Little Men,’ neither knows nor cares what the dwarves call her (and wouldn’t get the dwarven joke in any event). Despite the assumption that ‘she’ is a she, the dwarves really don’t even know if ‘Soot Black’ is a female, or if her ‘little men’ are males. Since Dark Stalkers don’t leave behind corpses to inspect, that will likely remain a mystery. But the day that ‘her’ body vanishes in a blast of stolen light and warmth will not come soon, as the Dark Stalker who refers to ‘herself’ as ‘Stealer of Songs’ continues to plague the dwarves of the Ninth Battalion, sneaking through their lines with her entire retinue as if the guards were asleep at their posts. Stealer of Songs has pioneered the use of alchemy to bolster her dark creepers abilities to move past the lines, using a variation on alchemical grease to lubricate cracks in the walls that even a small sized dark creeper shouldn’t be able to fit through, and forcing her ‘little men’ through with brute force. She has to take more caution, and her inhuman flexibility and intense training to force her larger, but still slender, body through the same seemingly impassible fissures. The dwarves, stout of form, and often clad in inflexible armor, and bearing bulky shields and weapons with many jagged protrusions, would be utterly incapable of matching her deeds, despite being close to her size. She and her creepers wear only flexible armor, usually reinforced cloth that serves as leather, or, in her case, soot-darkened mithral chain, partially concealed under yet more dark cloth. Their weapons are also simple and lack barbs or hooks or curved blades, for ease of passage through tight places, or the chinks in the thick armor of their foes… She currently lives much closer than the dwarves would suspect, concealed within a collapsed section of passageway that the dwarves regard as impassible (and played out, making it not worth re-exposing, from a mining standpoint), and goes one step beyond the average dark stalker, not just despising the existence of light, but also despising the presence of *sound.* She ruthlessly trains her dark creepers to communicate only in hand signals, and has developed a very small ‘vocabulary’ of specific gestures and body motions that allow her followers and herself to communicate vital information silently in the midst of a pitched, and eerily silent, battle with their hated dwarven competitors for underground resources. Using her alchemical skills, she has developed a unique poison, one that uses rust monster droppings and special fungus, as well as centipede venom, to cause the victims larynx to freeze up, rendering them incapable of speech. The venom works best if ingested or inhaled, and she has found a way to fill the egg-sacs of underground dwelling cave eels with the venom and using it as a splash weapon. The venom lacks the potency that she desires, and dwarves have proven stubbornly resistant to the toxin, forcing her to trade the toxin to dark stalkers who deal with less hardy races, such as the deep-dwelling elvenfolk, while she seeks out arcane trinkets that could deafen foes or render them speechless or create magical areas of silence. If anyone were to ever capture her, and unwind the black scarf around her neck, to reveal a jagged angry red scar across the otherwise luminscent perfect white skin of her throat, they might speculate as to why she loathes the sound of voices raised in song as much as she does. They'd be wrong, of course. She cut her own voice out as a sacrifice to who knows what dark power, although she can still speak in a guttural whisper, when the situation calls for it. Boons Stealer of Songs doesn’t do boons. She’s ruthless to her followers, taking only those who have trained to her specifications (1st level Rogues with ranks in Escape Artist and Linguistics (dark sign)), and she’s even less generous to non-dark folk, even if their assistance (witting or no) has helped her to cause the deaths of dwarves, bards, or, best of all, dwarven bards of the Ninth Battalion. The only ‘boons’ one could gain from Stealer of Songs is knowledge of how to craft her special venom, Lockjaw, or her special techniques for the use of a dose of alchemical grease to slick an area so that anyone attempting to squeeze through it gets a +5 alchemical bonus to checks, but reduced in duration by 10 minutes for each person who uses that passage (-80 minutes duration for her and her seven little men, giving her less than an hour and a half to get in, do some damage, and get back out before the grease has lost enough effectiveness that she’d need to use another pot to return herself and her full retinue). Her ‘little men’ also use alchemical throwables that are based off of tanglefoot bags, but are only large enough to befoul a single item, usually a torch or lantern (extinguishing it in the process), but sometimes thrown at weapons in hand (with a CMB roll) to ‘slime’ them and cause the user to suffer a -4 circumstance penalty to use that weapon until the gunk is removed (which takes a full round action and a Str check at DC 15). A clever alchemist who has survived one of her raids could spend a day or so and make a Craft (alchemy) check to replicate this use of the tanglefoot properties (uses a 2 lb. lump of the substance and costs 25 gp). |
