Role in Its Society:
Sszarka is the prophet-queen of a troglodyte midden-tribe, ruling from a reeking warren carved into the soft stone around an underground cesspit. To most Underdark denizens, her territory is simply “the Stench-Pits”—a place to avoid unless you’re desperate, lost, or too stupid to read the warning smell.
Her tribe lives on whatever the deeper world throws away:
- Slaughterhouse runoff from duergar forges.
- Rotting waste sluiced down from drow outposts.
- Dead beasts, broken slaves, and dumped prisoners.
Sszarka has turned this humiliation into a weaponized ecosystem. Her troglodytes lurk in sewage flows and garbage heaps, using their natural stench as camouflage and deterrent. They raid from the filth, then fade back into it, leaving enemies sickened and demoralized.
To the tribe, Sszarka is a sacred throat through which the spirits of rot and sludge speak. To outsiders, she’s a cunning war-leader who knows every seep, cistern, and overflow tunnel within miles—and how to flood or foul them when threatened.
Appearance Description:
Sszarka is a wiry, hunched troglodyte matriarch, her reptilian hide caked in layers of oily muck that have stained her natural gray-green scales a mottled brown-black.
Her eyes are pale and milky-yellow, set deep in a narrow skull with a jagged overbite of needle teeth. Bone charms, teeth, and rusted bits of metal pierce the frills along her head and neck, crusted with dried slime. Faint fungal growth and mold creep along her spine and shoulders where the filth has been thickest the longest.
Unlike many of her kin, Sszarka drapes herself in trophies of trash: woven strips of stained cloth, chains of bottle-caps and bent buckles, and a crude “crown” made from interlocked, rusted spoons and nails. Her claws and toes are long and splayed, perfect for gripping slick stone.
The stench around her is almost physical—a choking blend of rot, bile, and something acrid and chemical. The slime that drips from her scales sometimes glows faintly with sickly fungal bioluminescence, a warning smear in the dark.
Backstory:
Sszarka hatched in a troglodyte clutch that lived on the edge of everyone else’s filth. Her tribe’s “territory” was a tangle of drainage tunnels beneath a duergar smeltery and an old drow slave pen. Waste—both mundane and horrific—flowed down constantly.
As a young scavenger, Sszarka nearly died after falling into a sump filled with alchemical sludge and half-melted corpses. She survived by clawing her way through pipes and clotted muck, emerging days later with scarred lungs and a strange new resilience.
She discovered that the slurry of rot, fungus, and strange chemicals changed her. Her stench became stronger, more caustic; her hide grew resistant to poisons that felled others. When she raved from fever, her tribe heard sense in her madness: warnings of flood, of raiders, of the “stone rivers” that would shift above them. Her predictions came true often enough that they began to heed her as Filth-Tongue, a prophet who read omens in clotted drains.
Under Sszarka’s guidance, the tribe:
- Dug overflow channels and pits to redirect or weaponize sewage flows.
- Cultivated foul-smelling fungi and slime molds that burn the eyes and lungs.
- Learned the habits of those who dumped waste above, timing raids when guards were fewest.
Her warren is now a maze of sludge-channels, refuse berms, and hidden kill-pits. Drow and duergar sometimes try to “clear out the vermin,” but Sszarka knows her tunnels better than any invader—and if she can’t win the fight, she floods the battlefield with filth and disappears.
