Iron-Claws

Overview

Iron-Claws are the great armoured beasts of the Scourge, the heaviest of its Apex Predators. Each lives alone over a territory it defends against everything, and its jaws crush stone.

Appearance

An Iron-Claw is as large as a plough-team of oxen together, built low and wide on four thick legs, with a body plated in overlapping, rust-dark scutes that ring like metal when struck. Its head is short and massive, its jaws as broad as a cart, with flat, grinding teeth at the back and heavy fangs at the front. Its claws, which give it its name, are dark and dull like old iron and score rock as it walks. Its small eyes sit deep under plated brows. It moves slowly and heavily until it charges, and then it is shockingly fast. It roars rather than growls, a deep, rasping bellow that carries for miles, and it smells of rust and hot stone.

Habitat and Range

Each Iron-Claw holds a stretch of mountain slope or ruin in the Scourge, marked by claw-scored rock and crushed stone, and drives every other large creature out of it.

Behaviour and Temperament

An Iron-Claw is solitary and territorial. It patrols its ground, roars at its borders, and attacks anything large that comes into it, beast or traveller, with no warning beyond the roar. It eats whatever it kills, bones and armour included. Outside its territory it is far less dangerous, and it rarely follows a fleeing enemy across the border.

Abilities

Its jaws crush stone and bite through iron. Its plating turns arrows and most blades, and only heavy weapons or fire at its joints trouble it.

Life Cycle

An Iron-Claw leaves its territory only to find a mate, and the young are born armoured and are driven out to win ground of their own. They live very long, and an old one's scutes are grown thick as a castle door.

Uses and Dangers

Its scutes make the best armour on the Scourge and are worth a war-band's fortune; its claws are worked into picks and blades. Hunting one takes a war-band and costs it. Its danger is to anyone who strays into its ground.

Lore and Belief

Travellers who come back from the Scourge tell of iron beasts as big as houses, and the tales are only a little larger than the truth. A saying among them holds that on the Scourge an Iron-Claw's territory is the safest ground there is, because nothing else will enter it; travellers who try it rarely say so twice.

Sellsword companies that crossed for the Scourge's old arms tell of an Iron-Claw that sat on a battlefield hoard of ancient blades and killed three companies before a fourth lured it off with a burning wagon, and of how little they brought back for what it cost.

Where It Appears

• The Scourge
• Writers' Guide: The Planes