Hordling

Hordlings, sometimes spelled hordelings, were beings most often found in Hades. Hordlings varied wildly in size and strength, ranging from the small and weak to the large and powerful who would often rise to control hordes of their brethren. "The only similarity the hordlings have is that they’re all so sodding different."

- Regnus Roy

Description
Hordlings were a race of fiends that defied classification, their appearances, forms, and sizes varying so drastically that it was said that no two were exactly alike, although given their numbers it was impossible to be sure. The only traits their innumerable forms seemed to have in common were relative smallness&mdash;they were typically somewhere under in height, but this wasn't a rule&mdash;and universal hideousness.

Personality
Fittingly for a race as visually distinct as theirs, hordlings were chaotic in behavior. They were rebellious, disorderly, erratic, undisciplined, and bickering, sometimes leaving certain creatures alone and at other times attacking without warning. To peer inside the mind of a hordling was to find cluttering clouds of perpetual anger, passionately burning hate, and truly vile pettiness. They were the ultimate expressions of evil without order, linked in mentality only by their penchant for bestial, rampaging destruction.

Not even this role, however, could hordlings be trusted to fulfill, since it didn't take much to make them desert. They had varying levels of intelligence, some being as mindlessly marauding as lemures and others displaying enough cunning to outfox humans. The only thing hordlings seemed to recognize as a group was weakness, and they pounced on anyone that demonstrated it.

Despite their general disposition, every hordling was an individual creature, and their seemingly indistinct hatred was an expression of independence. Behind the rage was a miserable creature in a state of inner torment, an entity that retained a warped sense of self by refusing to let go of their hates in a fierce struggle for individuality. Every hordling had their own form of loathing, fostered through their own means for their own ends, thus did their unique inner hatred create their distinctive outer selves.

It was said that three behavioral categories of hordlings existed in different parts of the Outer Planes. The hordlings of the Gray Wastes were insidious and disturbing, those from the Red Prison of Carceri brutal and thuggish, and those from the sanity-eroding plane of Pandemonium were murderous madmen, with the Abyss holding all types. Such differences were so slight, however, that they were only evident to the hordlings themselves.

Abilities
The powers of the hordlings were as vast as the variety of their forms. For whatever reason, they could all become near-invisible for up to ten minutes, although this required a minute of preparation. There was also the fact that, despite having a host of unusual and sometimes supernatural powers, no hordling had spell-like abilities, separating them from most fiends.

Aside from that, there was no telling what an individual hordling could be capable of. Some had breath weapons, gaze attacks, phasing, sonic blasts, and could spit or shoot all manner of globs, bolts and beams. That wasn't to mention the simply physical harm they could do, as each was equipped with a random number of claws, fangs, hooves, tentacles, pincers, tusks, tails, spines, and wings to rend, bite, crush, grab, pierce, gore, slash, trip, and bludgeon. An element that one was immune to could be the crippling weakness or natural product of another, and their resistance to physical attacks, magic, and energy, to say nothing of their individual levels of regeneration, could all wildly vary.

Combat
Though their exact fighting style differed based on individual intelligence and abilities, hordlings were generally brutes, charging directly into combat and ripping into their enemies. They often made use of whatever extremity they were afforded at the time of their conception, though some with usable hands were known to wield weapons.

Individually, many hordlings could do little more than annoy with their random selection of traits, but it was when they gathered into their hordes that the race became truly dangerous. Their frenzied swarms flowed from target to target, dragging down their opposition like waves of flesh. Like a wave however, the flow of a hordling mob could be broken, either by a large enough effect causing them to scatter or due to individuals getting distracting and breaking away from the herd to do something else, such as lapping up a freshly spilt puddle of blood.

Society
Hordlings scoured their plane consuming anything in their path, including one another. Although hordlings would sometimes submit to stronger creatures, such as night hags, they were known for their untrustworthiness and their bickering.

Notable Hordlings

 * Phalse - a powerful hordling whose true form resembled that of a beholder with mouths at the end of the stalks instead of eyes. He considered the god of decay Moander to be his ancient adversary. He allied with the evil wizard Cassana in 1357 DR to use Finder Wyvernspur's designs to create a powerful and immortal construct weapon that later became the hero Alias.

Appearances

 * Novels
 * Azure Bonds


 * Song of the Saurials