Role in Its Society:
Among gnoll packs, Hruuk is not a chieftain elevated by brute dominance alone, but by something far more unsettling: memory. He serves as a living chronicle of violence, a scar-keeper whose body records every hunt, betrayal, and victory. Packs that follow Hruuk do so because he remembers their deeds—and ensures none are forgotten, even after death.
Hruuk’s authority is enforced through ritual rather than command. Before raids, he conducts scar-rites where younger gnolls must recount past kills while cutting symbolic marks into their own hides. Those who fail to remember accurately are punished, branded, or offered up as “empty meat.” Through this, Hruuk has reshaped his warband into something closer to a cult than a clan.
Outside gnoll society, Hruuk is known as a mercenary-tyrant and battlefield scavenger. He has allied with demon cults, warlords, and desperate factions, but only under one condition: the dead belong to him. He accepts no coin unless it carries a story worth carving into flesh.
Appearance Description:
Hruuk stands taller than most gnolls, his posture hunched yet powerful, like a beast perpetually bearing the weight of its past. His fur is thick and coarse, mottled brown and gray, permanently darkened by dried blood and ritual ash. Deep scars cross his chest, arms, and muzzle—some crude, some precise—each one deliberately preserved.
His armor is a grotesque collage of scavenged leathers, broken shields, and enemy insignia nailed directly into hardened hide. Small skulls and jawbones hang from cords around his shoulders, each etched with tally marks or names scratched in jagged Common and Abyssal.
Hruuk’s eyes glow a sickly yellow, not wild but intent, constantly scanning for weakness or recognition. When he breathes, there is the smell of iron and old smoke. Even at rest, his hands move—tracing scars, counting trophies, or worrying at old wounds as if rereading a beloved story.
Backstory:
Hruuk was once an unremarkable gnoll pup in a raiding band that prized speed and savagery over remembrance. During a failed assault on a fortified settlement, he was crushed beneath collapsing bodies and rubble, left alive but trapped for days among the dead.
As hunger set in, Hruuk fed not only on flesh, but on memory—learning the taste of fear, rage, and final thoughts. He began carving marks into his own skin to preserve these moments, believing that forgetting was the truest form of death.
When he finally escaped, Hruuk challenged his chieftain not with brute force, but with knowledge—reciting every failed hunt, every forgotten corpse. He slew and devoured the leader, saving the heart for last so he could “taste the end.” From that moment, his pack changed, becoming slower, more deliberate, and obsessed with legacy over survival.
Now, Hruuk hunts places rich in history: ruined fortresses, battlefields, ancestral towns. He believes the world itself is scarred, and that one day he will read it whole.
