B'rohg

B'rohg are lean giant-kin standing 15 feet tall when grown, with two legs, four arms, and skin baked a burnt orange by a lifetime under the desert sun. Their faces are sharp and angular, with flat noses and pointed ears set far back on the skull. Many are bald on top but let the hair at the back of the head grow to the waist, and none grow beards. Men and women alike dress simply in loose hides or breeches of reptile leather, often pieced together with scavenged scraps of cloth and armor.

Strong and naturally ambidextrous, a b'rohg makes four attacks each round: two at full skill and two at -2 to hit. Clubs and spears of stone are its weapons of choice, though anything within reach will do; a favorite setup is spears in the upper arms and clubs in the lower. Young b'rohg tend to swing all four, while older ones pad the lower pair to serve as shields, making two attacks and getting two parry attempts. They have never learned bows or other launchers and use only thrown missiles such as rocks, hurling at most two per round, both from the same side at once.

Whenever six or more travel together, the band has a dominant male with 6+3 Hit Dice and THAC0 13, who directs the fight. With a leader, b'rohg favor ambushes over head-on charges and break and run once two of the group have fallen; without one, they fight to the death.

Arena captives who escape become renegades, who make up 20% of b'rohg encounters, always alone. They have learned armor in the pits and build their own from bone, chitin and wood, for AC 1d3+2 (3, 4 or 5). Each usually carries a good weapon stolen from the arena, obsidian (75%) or metal (25%), and wields it together with a club or spear, attacking with both each round with no penalty.

B'rohg are nomadic hunter-gatherers living a stone-age life because they are not clever enough for anything else; even one raised from infancy among humans can grasp only simple ideas. They talk in grunts and hand signs. No one can teach them a modern language, and though a patient scholar can learn their signs, only basic ideas get across, and the same limit applies to magical or psionic contact.

A band contains one to four family units, called cliques, each made up of a single male, his one or two mates, and seldom more than four young. Males rule the family, but within the band the most able member does a job whatever its sex: the strongest hunt, while elders, the weak and the young gather food and carry water. Fire-making is beyond them, yet flames hold no terror for them, and a distant glow often draws them.

When traveling, each adult drags a sled of hide stretched over three wooden poles, loaded with children and the band's few possessions. At a fresh hunting ground the sleds and extra skins become small huts, using rocks and crevices as walls or extra rooms. A leader always picks the most defensible site.

Magic gets a reaction rather than suspicion or superstition. B'rohg who have dealt with spellcasters before may be awed or furious, depending on how that went, and those seeing magic for the first time are curious until they learn whether the caster means well or ill.

Renegades never fit back into the old way of life. They avoid wild b'rohg, ashamed both of having been caught and of their kin's simplicity, and find acceptance only among escaped-slave tribes, where they become superb warriors and laborers among familiar arena comrades, free of the whip.

A b'rohg could live 80 years, but few do in such a harsh land, and many young die. Death is a concept they do not understand; they tend to leave alone anything that shows no sign of life, except in battle, where they may keep pounding a dead foe to make sure it stays down. They eat other races but never their own kind.

They make nothing and trade nothing, but they are star attractions in the arenas of the desert world's city-states, though they rarely gain anything from winning. Their owners treat them as animals and never let them earn freedom. Some captives are too dull to try escaping, others die fleeing the sorcerer tyrants' cities, and plenty, being cunning if not bright, slip away into the wilderness. A few are lured into captivity with sweets, cold water and simple comforts, but most are simply overwhelmed by numbers. Lasting friendship with one is rare, since a b'rohg soon forgets who is a friend and who is a foe.