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 all 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 MOTHER TIAMAT, won’t attack you, unless you attack them first. She has adopted you as one of her own.

Furthermore, you have attracted 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 TIAMAT remember, if only faintly, the Old World before the coming of Lugal. This is an unimaginable heresy.

Roll 1d10 or choose the nature of your monstrous companion:

1. The first entry is the exception. The Last Giant is no child of TIAMAT. He is the smallest and slightest of those antediluvian folk, yet stands taller than two elephants stacked atop one another. He is like one of the great stones that make up the mountains: immovable, except by his own will. His memory of his sunken kingdom was washed away by the flood; he does not even remember his own name, much less the name of Lemuria. Should ever Lugal lay eyes upon him, He will mark him for death. No memory of Lemuria can remain but Himself.
2. AZ is the great bull of heaven, birthed anew each dawn in those trysts between TIAMAT and the sun, then slaughtered again each evening. Sunrise beauty is a divine afterbirth; sunset beauty is paid with the bull's blood. He will offer his neck and belly to you in an offer of friendship—it is distinct from submission. Slaughter him before a battle and gorge yourself on his guts, filling yourself with his divine vigor. Have no fear—he will be born again in the morning.
3. NAINI, the serpent with seven mouths, is the youngest spawn of TIAMAT and RED ZEHIER, birthed from a drop of his blood that landed in the ocean after his murder. Her venom is as red as her scales, and takes weeks of incapacitating agony to kill its victims. She will allow you to milk her for her venom—a sensual act—which you can apply to your weapons, though it corrodes them soon enough. With her as your lover, no Urukite will ever trust you again. Her very presence is ruinous.
4. ANSUK is the thunderhead, born to TIAMAT by the greatest of the ocean storms. Her head is that of a lion; she flies on eagle's wings. When she roars it is thunder, and in this instance and this instance only does it come before the lightning—her cousin is bade to strike wherever she so chooses.
5. SIF is the son of TIAMAT and the desert wind that blows hotly out over the ocean, whorling atop the surface of the waves. He is a wolf larger than an elephant and, alone of TIAMAT's children, has learned from the men so intent on infesting the surface of the earth: he carries a sword of fire in his mouth and is skilled in the techniques of the first masters. He learned from them personally, but has added his own flourishes on their techniques—a favorite is to leap into the air and twirl about in a blazing tornado, setting anything and everything on fire. It would be an intimate thing, for SIF, to carry his lover when he takes flight.
6. LILIT is the eldest daughter of TIAMAT and the dark moon AESHARA, a black leopard who can emerge from her own mouth to take the form of the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. As a woman, LILIT has black, shiny hair that comes down almost to her calves; you can almost see the spots if the light hits it right. In this form, she can pass as your daughter or wife, though she is subtly unnerving—she hungers, and anyone who meets her gaze knows it. Most would have to protect their lover from their men—you must protect them from her. Binding her hair traps her in womanly form and cutting it transforms her permanently: an unimaginable cruelty, though an effective enforcement of your authority. Who wouldn't want the most beautiful woman in the world for a wife?
7. The Herd is as one creature; they move together, sleep together, eat together. Larger and swifter than any kunga, these children of TIAMAT and the ocean breeze can be ridden (and ridden as they run on water, at that), granting the rider an unmatched advantage in combat. They are the only horses to ever exist, and they are man-eaters—anyone other than their lover who tries to ride them becomes a convenient meal.
8. DRACO is a bestial thing, born of an ill-fated tryst between TIAMAT and the serpent ZEHIER. He is like a crocodile that has grown the musculature of a tiger; he moves in leaps and bounds, not shuffling ambushes, though he can swim just as speedily as either creature.
9. CETUS is the first and eldest child of TIAMAT, born to her and her alone. He is a monster best at home in the bitter salt sea, where he acts as his mother's enforcer: no Urukite ship survives his attack; only in their size are they evenly matched. His spines, emerging from the waves like a sign spelling doom, are enough to break the morale of any sailor. He will follow his lover anywhere but on land.
10. UGZU, the great bat out of hell, is the exiled child of TIAMAT and the doorkeeper of hell. He is a slavering, unholy thing that loves nothing more but to consume the corpses of great heroes, whose shades are then ever cursed to wander. He feeds what’s left of their triumphs; he savors the remnant taste of their joy and satisfaction like no other can. From his time at his father's side knows the secrets of the past dead, and with his huge, conical ears he sometimes hears new ones echo up from Sheol. It is these secrets that he offers to his lover as pillow talk.

Δ: Enkidu

At any time you may spend a season in the company of a Grace⁶ to forsake your old ways and forge your life anew as a Zealot 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