Urd

Urds, sometimes called winged kobolds, were distant relatives of kobolds, with the power of flight, thanks to a pair of bat-like wings.

Etymology
The word urd was simply Draconic for "wing".

Description
Urds were frail, around tall, with yellow to red scales and a pair of white horns. Their leathery wings stretched.

In flight, urds were fast and maneuverable, and could glide for long distances. They were not quite so graceful on land, having to hunch themselves forward to offset the weight of their relatively large wings. This forced them to partly hop when walking.

Urds rarely wore much clothing, but they would decorate their bodies with natural trinkets&mdash;bones or fruit, for example&mdash;depending on their gen.

Combat
In combat, urds preferred to attack under the cover of darkness by dropping sharp stones from above.

Biology
Although they could live over a hundred years, life expectancy was only around fifty. They possessed darkvision.<

Homelands
Urds were found in the Starspire Mountains in County Starspur of Tethyr. They were also known to occasionally be found in nearly all of the mountain ranges in the Hordelands.

Language
Most urds could speak a small vocabulary of Common, Draconic, their own language, and the language of kobolds.

Religion
Urds worshiped their patron god, Kuraulyek. Some revered the kobold deity Kurtulmak instead, and Kuraulyek's priests made it their primary duty to wipe out incidences of Kurtulmak-worship from their flocks.

History
The Treatise Historical of the Dragon Tyrants recounted that circa, early members of the kobold race mated with chromatic dragons to produce the first dragonwrought kobolds. These dragonwrought kobolds came to work in teams known as wings, or urds in the Draconic language. The leader of the urds in those days was a blue dragonwrought kobold named Kuraulyek. Kuraulyek led the urds away from the kobold homeland in order to escape the first Rage of Dragons, settling in bat-haunted caverns beneath what were later called the Thunder Peaks. Without the urds to watch over the kobold lands, the dragon Caesinsjach slaughtered most of those kobolds who survived Garl Glittergold's collapse of their caverns. When Kurtulmak became divine, he vowed revenge on the cowardly Kuraulyek for deserting the kobolds in their hour of need, but Asgorath made Kuraulyek divine as well. The new god fled to the Barrens of Doom and Despair, where he remained to the 14th century DR, still fearful of Kurtulmak's retribution.

This tale may be somewhat apocryphal, however, since other sources placed the First Rage of Dragons five hundred years prior to the creation of the urds.

Appearances

 * Adventures
 * Dungeon #39 Below Vulture Point • Hoard of the Dragon Queen
 * Organized Play & Licensed Adventures
 * A Thousand Tiny Deaths