The Slayer Cult

The Slayer Cult is the strange and tragic brotherhood of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds, a fellowship of the shamed and the grieving who have taken the Slayer Oath. Each has committed some failure or suffered some loss so grievous that only death can restore his honour (a broken oath, a fallen kin-lord, a hold lost to the darkness), and so he dyes his hair in great orange crests, forsakes his old life, and goes seeking a doom worthy of the telling.

A Slayer's purpose is not to survive but to die gloriously, slain by the mightiest foe he can find. Troll, giant, dragon, daemon: the greater the monster, the more honourable the death, and so the Slayers hurl themselves against horrors that whole armies would flee. That so many survive is a bitter irony, for each victory only deepens their shame and drives them to seek an ever-deadlier end.

The cult has its shrines and its ranks: Trollslayers, Giantslayers, and the legendary Daemonslayers who have somehow lived through every doom set before them. Bare-chested, tattooed, and armed with axes they wield with berserk abandon, the Slayers march at the fore of the dwarf throng against the ratmen and the greenskins. To their kin they are objects of pity and awe alike: the living dead of dwarf society, walking proof that even the stubborn folk of the mountains can be broken past all mending.