He jostles at the watering place with the animals (Class: Wild Man)

15 Sep, 2025

“Right” and “wrong” are the emptiest of words when you’re hungry. All must eat. The strong just eat more and often.

The Wild Man

Urukites consider you a man.¹
Extra starting item: chipped weapon, long since permanently bloodstained
A: Leader of the Pack,² Pillager-Lord, Rage,³ Wild Man
B: Mindless Abandon
C: Among the Beasts
D: Adopted Child
Δ: Enkidu

A: Leader of the Pack

You are the leader of a warband⁴ of hard, violent, and armed men. Like you, they are savage and unruly. By default, the warband consists of ten veteran killers wearing some form of light armor and armed with spears and shields. In addition, choose two traits from this list:

• Your warband is twenty warriors instead of ten, acting as two warbands during violence. Promote a lieutenant to command the second band.
• Your warband is well-armed, with each warrior wielding spears alongside axes or swords (the latter marking them as man-killers and thus due no right to hospitality, though greatly increasing their fearsomeness on the battlefield).
• Your warband is well armored, with each warrior wearing some form of medium armor.
• Your warband is trained and disciplined. There is a 5-in-6 chance for them to obey your orders forbidding pillage and rapine, no matter your breath.

And choose one trait from this list (eschew options that conflict with your choices above):

• Your warband is unruly and mutinous. There is only a 1-in-6 chance for them to obey your orders forbidding pillage and rapine, no matter your breath.
• Your warband is loose-knit, with members coming and going: prime for desertion.
• Your warband is rife with internal conflicts and rivalries.
• Your warband is in significant debt to someone else.
• Your warband is filthy and unwell.

So long as your warband has seen the fruits of violence and rapine in the past year, you needn’t pay them wages each spring.

When you order your warband to do something they are not immediately inclined to do—such as not pursuing violence and rapine—roll breath. On a success, you don’t have to make an example of one of them for them to obey. On a failure, your leadership of the warband will be contested by one or several of them.

Additionally, it is your duty to have—or at least oversee—homosexual relationships with your men. If you take one of your men as a lover, the warband gains advantage on morale rolls. Others will take their own as well. If your lover dies, grief consumes you. You must then roll breath to rage until the end of the next season or until you host a grand and expensive funeral for him: whichever comes later.

A: Pillager-Lord

You are not the permanent ruler of a particular nome.⁵ Accordingly, you cannot raise levies, collect taxes, or build holdings. Instead, your influence travels with you and your warband. Wherever you go, your warband does too. A nomarch in whose nome you’re camped in during spring does not collect taxes; instead, you pillage an equivalent amount to fill your own pockets.

Legally, you and your warband cannot enter a nome without its nomarch’s permission. Oftentimes this permission is granted only after some threat of violence. Of course, if they never grant permission, you could just enter anyways, kill the nomarch if they resist, and proclaim yourself the new nomarch. Obviously you can enter your own nome.

A: Rage

You have a pool of rage points equal to your level plus one. You may spend a point when rolling fortitude to wildly succeed, or when violence begins to enter a rage for the duration. While raging, you take half damage from all weapons and cannot do anything defensive, curative, or tactical with your allies. All you can do is attempt to kill things. While raging, you cannot stop fighting until you kill, subdue, or drive off all enemies, or until you succeed a breath roll at the beginning of your turn to end the rage.

When you eat a rich feast, drink deep, and get a good night's rest, regain a rage point. When you go hungry, stay up all night, and brood on your many enemies, regain a rage point.

If disrespected while your rage pool is full, roll breath to resist attacking the disrespecter with lethal intent.

A: Wild Man

Greet the morning sun with an insane stream of invective, slurs, and death threats. Curse the river, curse Lugal, curse the priests in their temples and the nomarchs in their villas, curse every man on earth, then curse the earth itself. Scream until your voice is little more than a hoarse roar. Claw your bare chest until the blood flows freely. Slick your hair and beard back with it. Anyone who hears you rightfully concludes you're out of your mind. Until you sleep or fuck, your teeth and nails are as knives, and you may attack an opponent with them before initiative is rolled each round.

B: Mindless Abandon

Gibber and drool. Lose yourself in savagery. Roll your eyes back until it hurts. While raging, you are immune to mind-altering effects, and those who attempt to read your mind receive a concussion.

C: Among the Beasts

Wild animals won’t attack you unless you attack them first. They see you as one of their own.

In addition to—or instead of—men, wild beasts are now attracted to your warband. Lions, panthers, foxes, boars, jackals, and hyenas will fight alongside you and obey you as well as your men do even without understanding your speech. You find yourself grunting wordless commands more than talking now, anyway.

Further, you can take a wild animal as a lover just as you can one of your men. If you take one of your beasts as a lover, you gain a fitting bestial ability (e.g., if you take a leopard as a lover, you can scale walls, trees, and cliffs as quickly as a leopard; or, if you take a cheetah as a lover, you can sprint as quickly as it can in short bursts). If you take an animal as a lover, your men will never again willingly take you as a lover. You grow too wild even for them.

If you engage with a domesticated animal in any way that is not slaughtering it, you lose this ability forever, and all wild beasts forsake you as a friend betrayed.

D: Adopted Child

Monsters, those children of the Abyssal Mother, won’t attack you, unless you attack them first. She has adopted you as one of her own.

Furthermore, you attract one of your adopted siblings to join your warband: a monstrous creature, far from humanity. The monster requires no wages; instead, it must be fed quintuple rations lest it begin feeding on you and yours. By default, it will not fight alongside your warband on the field of battle. Your enemies need not know this, however, and so long as your monstrous companion is in a nome, enemy armies refuse to attack you there.

Neither your men nor your wild beasts will fraternize with it. It is isolated, but it prefers it that way. It will suffer only your company, and it will do more than suffer it; you can take the monster as a lover just as you can one of your men or wild beasts. Doing this will strain the morale of your warband to near-irreparable levels. You may have gone too far beyond the pale.

If you take your monstrous companion as a lover, it will fight alongside you in battle. It is a warband-sized creature. Also, you can, with focus, interpret your lover’s rambling, agonised speech of antediluvian memories and take on powers now forgotten, for all children of the Mother of Monsters remember, if only faintly, the Old World before the coming of Lugal. This is an unimaginable heresy.

Δ: Enkidu

At any time you may spend a season in the company of a Grace to forsake your old ways and forge your life anew as a Zealot⁶ of equivalent level. She promises you peace. Does it not hurt to fight for so long?

If not preemptively disbanded, a new Wild Man rises to take your place and lead your former warband. You become just another enemy to kill.

#GLoG #MEGsopotamia #class