Bargda

Bargdas share a faint kinship with minotaurs but are stronger and much more repulsive, cursed with a putrefying sickness. They stand a stooped and crooked 9 feet tall, with warped ram heads and sickly green eyes. Half of them speak Common, but so thickly that only other bargdas can make it out.

Humans and demihumans who look upon a bargda must save vs. spell or suffer -2 to attack and damage rolls from sheer revulsion.

It swings an iron-shod wooden club for 4d4 and bites for 1d10. A bitten victim must also save vs. poison or contract its wasting disease, which dulls the reflexes so that he automatically loses initiative every round and drains 1 Dexterity per hour, down to a minimum of 3. Cure disease ends the illness, and the lost Dexterity returns at 1 point per day.

Bargdas lair in dark, gloomy caves and come out to raid remote settlements. They live alone or in small family groups or mated pairs. Every two years or so a female bears 4 to 8 young, all born diseased; most die before they can walk, and few survive to breed. The young remain with the family until about age 15.

Hill giants, ogres and trolls are the only living things they do not hate, and bargdas bully them into service and lead against human and demihuman towns. In settled lands, a bargda encounter has a 90% chance of including 2d12 of these brutes, of one type chosen by the DM or a mix of all three.

Treasure is precious to them, both as a badge of status that proves how many raids they have led and as a tool for swaying other intelligent creatures. They hide it carefully, and a bargda facing defeat in its lair may offer its hoard to buy its life.

Omnivores, they eat anything from fungus to furry animals, but cannot digest food until it has been seeded with an enzyme made by the same microbe that causes their disease. If a slain foe was not infected during the fight, the bargdas bite and lick the body to coat it with germs, then set it aside to ripen before feeding. Their lairs reek of festering larders. When corpses run short they lick rotting plant stalks and leave those to ripen too.

The sickness keeps them alive but slowly ruins them. By 40 or 50 years of age a bargda's reflexes are failing, and before long a younger rival or its own resentful servants will kill it.