The Hammerborn are the warrior clans of the mountains and high wild country of the Surface.
Speed 75% · Health 150%
Green-skinned giants with blue blood, heavy brows, amber eyes, and usually bald, the Hammerborn are the most physically formidable people in the world. They wear almost nothing and refuse armor of any kind and their only weapon is a great two-handed wooden club (which they wield with one hand). Their bodies are covered in faint scars and tattoos that record their deeds — a Hammerborn’s life history can be read from their skin. They are immensely strong: a club blow breaks shields and bone, wounds barely slow them, they can run and fight all day, and they thrive in cold and at altitudes that fell anyone else. They are also loud — drums, war-cries, and chant travel ahead of them — and they never sneak.
Range, heat, open lowland ground, and quick footwork are the answers to them: a Hammerborn far away is much less dangerous than one within club’s reach, and their charge can be sidestepped by a nimble fighter. They are easy to provoke and will accept almost any formal challenge to single combat. Defeat one honourably and you earn a respect that can become friendship; defeat one by treachery and you inherit a feud that outlives you. And never call them trolls — the word is a deadly insult, answered with violence.
The clans tell of an old time when the world was struck by a great hammer, and of ancestors who walked out of the mountains after. They live as nomadic clans in hide-tent camps called Drum-Camps, gather by the thousands at summer Moots, and are led loosely by their chieftains and by the Drum-Mothers, the senior shamans whose word alone crosses clan lines.
Some say that the Hammerborn hold that Vox Maxa is sound — real, percussive, physical sound. For them, to be loud is to be heard; to be quiet is to be forgotten; and to be forgotten is worse than death. The Crucibles, the ancient arenas where the sound runs strongest, are the most sacred ground there is — shared, grudgingly, with the Mallardine — and a warrior who dies in one is believed to join the great sound forever.