RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR (Warhammer Fantasy Golden Age Dwarf Runelord Quest)

Winning Vote: said:

[X] [Stone:] Right
[Improves general toughness. Wearer's endurance and durability increase proportionately to their willpower]

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Thungni was deliberate, you suppose, in choosing the Rune of Stone to be the last in this long, painful sequence. The first Rune discovered, the first Rune learned. The foundation of your life, your Clan, and your Guild. During this Trial, and this Trial alone your Ancestor asks you a simple question.

What is a Dwarf?
Ask a thousand Dwarfs and you will receive a thousand answers. Some aggrandizing, some cynical, most somewhere in between.

You shake your head and focus on the the Runes. The leftmost Rune, you rule it out. For all the message it sends, you know your people and the dark past they overcame. The need for community maybe it could be innate, but history has shown how fractured your people can be. The communal spirit that builds and binds the Karaz Ankor was and is fought for, cultivated and grown like Wutroth.

The center Rune, well it immediately feels like the wrong answer to this question. To not react to the world, to whats happening around you is the height of apathy or madness. What you do in the face of it, that is what matters.

That leaves the last Rune. Immediately it reads the truest "answer" of the three to you. It feels—

—using nothing but your Will to keep going—

—It feels right.

Once bitten and twice shy, you quickly pluck the Rune from the plinth and eye the room warily, waiting for the other boot to drop. Both you and Karstah cautiously step back once, then again, and again, never once relaxing as you make your way past the plinths to the other end of the room.

But nothing happens.

Instead, when you come to the path out of the chamber you see that it's blocked by an imposing wall of what looks like Pure Gromril. And there, smack dab in the center, even highlighted by a lovely golden trim around the edges, are three indentations that matched the exact shape of the ingots in your possession. The corresponding symbol of the Runes were, you realize as you examine it, even engraved in them as well. Giving you instructions that were about as clear as they could be without shouting in your ears.

Three spaces.

Three Runes.

Did you choose correctly?

You pass one of the Runes to Karstah with a nod, and the two of you move to put them in their corresponding spot.

Karstah goes first, lining up the ingot before pushing it in as deep as it can go. She steps away, and you see that the bar fits the space without any visible gaps, fully flush with the rest of the wall. Then, you see the Rune on the ingot flare briefly then do nothing at all. When you do the same with the second ingot, pushing in the ingot with a surprising lack of resistance, it does the same as the Rune of Warding, briefly flaring in intensity before returning to its usual level of brightness. The lack of response is worrisome, but you put the anxiety aside and quickly put the last ingot into place before you and Karstah step back and wait.
Each Rune flashes in order from left to right. Warding, followed by Courage, and then Stone.
You watch it repeat the sequence several more times, the delay between the flash of one Rune and the next growing shorter and shower with each pass.
The delay between flashes eventually grows so small that it seems all three Runes are glowing in tandem. Their light remained steady for several minutes.
Until the entire slab of Gromril, the ingots still inside, suddenly begins to glow brighter as well, casting a stark blind light that forces you to close your eyes.

Fearing the worst, you activate Barak Azamar and move to stand in front of Karstah, but before you can smack the adjacent wall with your hammer and put a barrier of stone between you and the door, the light subsides as suddenly as it appeared.

You open your eyes, and to your absolute astonishment, find the door gone with no hint of its existence remains. To be sure you even use Zharrgal and pull apart several meters worth of the surrounding stone like putty to see if the door had simply moved and been covered up, but you find absolutely nothing. The only thing stopping you from spending more time looking is Karstah, who points down the newly revealed hallway insistently.

"The ingots weren't the prize, and neither was the door. It's what's behind it, Master Snorri," she says plainly.

You want to argue, to keep looking, to grab those ingots, but you push such unbecoming thoughts aside and acknowledge your heir's point.

"Bah," you grouse before letting out a long, forlorn sigh. "Aye lass you're right. Come along then, let me just put this back the way it was and we'll be off."

So, as much as it stings to lose out on all that metal, you must continue on.

That doesn't stop you from turning back to glare at the space where the door once stood before you do so.

Thungni, it seemed, was a smidge stingy about those bars.


Tools are the way your folk shape this world, and a good craftsman uses the right tool for the right job. For most craftsmen that meant having a large array of tools to do the right job, and if they didn't then they either upgraded an existing tool, or made a new one for it. It's a universal enough experience that most Guilds had a joke about the topic that boiled down to "You can tell how skilled someone is by how many tools they have to do the same job."

Folk either embraced the idea whole cloth and grew their collection as surely as they grew the gold in their hoard or the length of their beard or plaits, while others did their best to make versatile pieces that could manage a variety of tasks. Regardless, it was fairly safe to say that the amount of tools you had almost always went up as you got older and the scope of your abilities grew. After all, a Dwarf's starting set of tools wasn't meant to last them their whole careers, and any Elder that told you he used the same hammer since he was an apprentice was probably forgetting to mention how many times he'd replaced the shaft or swapped out the head. Precious few things are eternal, even less are eternal and unchanging.

But now you're about to see one of those few things that are.

As you come to the next room, you find no door barring your way from seeing what was inside. A hexagonal chamber, walls bereft of any decoration, with a single shaft of light coming down directly on the center of the entire space.

And there under its gaze, resting innocently on a pedestal of virgin stone, is the reward for all of your troubles.

Karaz-Kazak-Rhun.

With it, Thungni made the weapons and armour of the most legendary heroes, built monuments and creations that bedeviled and confounded even the eldest of His children, and slew more monsters than there were stars in the sky.

You and Karstah unknowingly stop at the room's threshold, instinctively reverent of what you see, before the two of you realize what you're doing and move.

There are no words shared.

Only the quiet thud of leaden footsteps as you make your way towards the hammer.

Master Yorri always told you that a craftsman worried about three factors when creating something: if he had the right tools, if he had the right material, and if he had the skill. Shoddy tools meant he worried about all three, good tools meant he only worried about only material and skill, and the greatest tools could let a Dwarf make gold from pyrite. That, "if you had the right tools and the right maker," the only thing stopping you was your own imagination.

Of course he also followed that up by reminding your younger self that it was the quality of the wielder that really mattered in that equation. And that a great craftsman, like himself, could do more with rock and stone than a poor one, like you, could with Karaz-Kazak-Rhun.

You doubted that Master Yorri ever considered that you would probably ever be able to test that theory.

In front of you, less than an arm's length away, was Thungni's personal hammer, and you're close enough now to tell just how beyond you it actually is.

A one handed war hammer with a handle of dark-stained Wutroth exactly forty-nine centimeters long, and a head and end cap of pure Gromril. Lengths of Silver wire used all along the handle's surface to create the pattern of diamond braided leather, broken up by five equally spaced bands of Gromril inset with Turquoise Sapphires between head and end cap. The head is a piece of Gromril twenty-one centimeters long from face to claw. The head is decorated simply, with inlaid lines of blackened Gromril and inset Turquoise Sapphires to create images of Valaya the Warder and Grungni the Smith respectively on each cheek, and four crisscrossing spirals down the length of the claw. You've seen and interacted with the recreations used by the Runesmith Clans enough that you know the look of it by heart.

You know this hammer, were told stories of it and its wielder since you were a boy, beheld it countless times over the course of your millennium and change of life, and have examined its replica so much that you know every part of it short of the Runes inscribed on it.

It should not astound you at this point.

And yet when you stare at the original, with all Seven of its Runes, you are understandably awed.

Glittering golden, and only further contrasted by the diagonal border of blackened Gromril framing each one, the Runes are a thing of brilliant beauty.

None alive save Thungni know how they are made, nor what each one exactly does for certain, but every young Runesmith knows their names.

Where His Ancestor Rune would be on the replica, Thungni's Master Rune of Grounding dominates the hammer's face, while the Master Rune of Precision flanks the left side, followed by the Runes of Breaking and Flamecraft, and the Master Rune of Craftsmanship, Rune of Forgecraft and Rune of Metalcrafts does the same for the right.

Seven Runes, on Gromril when you cannot even manage four on Adamant.

It humbles as surely as it inspires.

And somehow, you and Karstah have reached it.

Speaking of, you turn your head to look at your heir and find her staring back at you expectantly.

With a final nod, you reach out with your hand and grasp the hammer's handle.

Some part of you expects there to be a great torrent of magic, some deep, rumbling voice proclaiming to the world of your deeds, or other such gestures of success.

But when you lift the hammer off its resting place, the Runes on it blazing briefly to life before settling down as you do so, there is…

nothing.

And then the cavern begins to quake.

The Construct duly acknowledges the conclusion of the Trial, and with a final, restive sigh returns to lifeless stone that is soon shattered by a falling boulder as the animating fragment within leaves, returning to the whole it was cleaved from.

At the epicenter of the event, the Gift Giver, his heir, and the Hearth Guard that were waiting for them three chambers back are subjected to the ten most terrifying minutes of their lives as they stumble and run their way through a collapsing cavern as Trial chambers are shaken apart and the earth fills the gap behind them. Klausson is swinging Zharrgal hither dither as he runs, making stone pillars and braces jut out from the ground and walls to shore up the crumbling path. His heir, handed the Ancestor's hammer by her teacher for safekeeping, and the Hearthwardens trailing right behind him.

Kazador is quietly examining the Runes on currently pinned Gronti when he and the others are knocked over by the sudden onset of movement. Shaking his head clear, he looks over to the Gronti, and sees it has crumbled completely. With a word, he and his party briskly jog their way back to the exit, finding themselves immediately outside of the cavern despite having walked for hours.

Ylva nearly stumbles when the first tremor comes from the cavern. Catching herself on a wagon, she begins shouting for the wounded to be loaded up and the wagons to be driven away from whatever's happening. She turns to see Kazador Ironwill and his retinue jog out from a cloud of dust kicked up by the rumbling cavern.

Both reach a safe enough distance away where, for some strange reason, the shaking is barely felt, watching and feeling the earth make its displeasure known. Ylva lets out a sigh of relief when she sees the silhouettes

In Izril an almost imperceptible tremor is felt by the populace as the great array of stabilizing Runes disperses the tectonic energy that Thungni's Runes safely directed up from the collapsing cavern below. Causing nothing more than a few drunk Dawi to sway a bit harder than usual.


You didn't expect to see anyone besides the Hearth Guard out here.

Kazador Ironwill looks your way impassively, though you see his eyes flick over to Karstah, or more accurately the hammer in her hands, every so often.

"Lord Ironwill," you greet with a firm nod, accepting Karaz-Kazak-Rhun from Karstah, "You were also given a riddle then?"

"Aye," he says with a nod, "a few years before, I received a cryptic letter from an anonymous source that I can show you later. I imagine you received the same one."

A part of you thinks about telling him that you got yours nearly a century ago, but that doesn't seem necessary.

"I got this riddle from a book, but I reckon they come from the same source," you reply.

"I would agree with that conclusion, Lord Gift Giver. So that's it then?" he prompts, nodding at a still winded Karstah.

"Aye," you confirm.

"Then it's as I expected, we arrived just in time to see the winner claim his prize," Kazador says good naturedly before turning his gaze to the still dissipating cloud of dust behind you. "Shame I couldn't spend more time examining the Runes in those chambers."

You find yourself nodding in agreement.

"Thungni doesn't believe we need a leg up like that I suppose,"

Kazador hums in contemplation before turning back to look at you.

"What then Lord Klausson, are you going to do? Was that hammer the only prize you claimed from that place? Aside from your observations too, obviously."

You're about to say what you read on the plinth, to tell him that whosoever wields this hammer was the heir of Thungni, the Glitter-eyed, the Lord of all Runes, Wondermaker and many more titles besides.

But you hesitate.

Is that truly the fate you desire? To be the heir of Thungni is more than just a title. You would be Thungni, in all ways, to be forever in his shadow until you fit it like a hand does a glove. Because that is what you were taught and what you believe, and you could not accept anything less. Just as Snorri Whitebeard is Grungni's Heir. Just as Karstah is yours.

Snorri Klausson would be known forever for his relation to Thungni, of taking up His mantle.

Rather than forging his own.

What height of hubris this must sound like to an outside, to think you could ever achieve anything greater, or even as great as the Ancestors.

But some infinitely small part of you, that proud and egotistical spark that shames and drives you in equal measure, the part that influenced you to build Khazagar, to almost kill yourself on the Anvil balks at the idea of not even trying.

Yet.

Yet, the rest of you knows what such a position could bring. With the title of heir, precious few could contest your will. It would make your life so much easier, help you improve the Karaz Ankor, if you took on this responsibility. What more could Khazagar do without threat of censure. What could be learned by pushing for a better, more standardized Runesmiths Guild?

And what would be lost?


[ ] Claim the Title of Heir: [Cost: ???] Gain title: Heir of Thungni, ??? You claim a position that has remained in doubt since Durin died. By Thungni's word, the hammer you would now wield confirms that you are His Heir. Elevating your authority to that of the Ancestor's eldest children, living or dead. You would not, could not be a tyrant of course, but still.

[ ] Refuse the Title of Heir: [Cost: Nothing] Gain ???. You will take up this hammer, you will use it, but you are your own Dwarf with your own goals. The burden of carrying Thungni's Will, of being His Heir, is one you choose not to carry. Someone or no one can claim it for all you care, but it will not be you.



- Gain Ancestral Artefact, Karaz-Kazak-Rhun, new Research unlocked!
-- His hammer. With it in hand Thungni has crafted uncountable wonders and slain innumerable foes. Now it is in your possession.

- Ancestral Artefact, Karaz-Kazak-Rhun: [Rune of Flamecraft, Rune of Breaking, Master Rune of Precision,Thungni's Master Rune of Grounding, Master Rune of Craftsmanship, Rune of Forgecraft, Rune of Metalcraft]

- New Runes/ Combos Unlocked!
-- New Rune unlocked! Rune of Worldly Warding: [Blows against the wearer cause the struck area to become increasingly resistant against that type of damage]
-- New Rune unlocked! Rune of Inner Courage: [The wearer has increased bravery. They become generally aware of spells and items being used to negatively impact their mental state.]
-- New Rune unlocked! Rune of Defiant Stone: [Improves general toughness. Wearer's endurance and durability increase proportionately to their willpower]
-- New Combo unlocked! Combo, Dawi: [Rune of Worldly Warding, Rune of Inner Courage, Rune of Defiant Stone] All buffs to general toughness and endurace grow in proportion to the wearer's willpower and bravery. Repeated/Continued exposure to spells and items that negatively impact their mental state cause them to become increasingly resistant to those effects. The courage to stare at a world that wishes you dead, then scoff in its face and swear to take it down with you.


- Epiphanies!
-- +2 Progress to Akazit Pt. 2
-- +2 Progress to The Secrets of Storage Pt. 2
-- +1 Progress to The Secrets of Light Pt. 2
-- +6 Progress to The Mind of Things Pt. 6
-- +4 Progress to The Rune Metal Pt. 7
-- +3 Progress to The Movement of Things Pt. 6b, The Body
-- +3 Progress to The Movement of Things Pt. 6c, The Soul
-- +3 Progress to The Movement of Things Pt. 7:

Karaz-Kazak-Rhun - "Enduring War Rune"/ the Runehammer of Thungni


Sorry for the long, LONG, delay. A lot of moving and travelling this August. Like way more than expected! Anyways, I hope the hammer was worth the wait. I think its nice at least. As always, please don't forget to C&C. :^)