Lesser vruul
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The lesser vruul has tough, leathery hide, as black as midnight. Bat-like wings sprout from its back, but they do not look large or strong enough to support its weight in flight. The vruul's claws are long, sharp and appear to be stained with the blood of many victims. Its eyes are eerie, solid green orbs that seem to glow with an inner power.
Hunting strategies
Vruul coexist within the dark vortece area, which always make warding attacks. You will want to make sure the vorteces cannot hit you, sometimes casting four times in a single round. The vorteces do not wander into the left side of the Dark Shrine, and the vruul do not wander into the huge cavern. When traveling up or down the stairs you should peer ahead so you are not on your back in hard RT in front of the vruul with their battleaxes. Vorteces are harmless if warded off.
Vruul will stand up and leave the room in a single action. They will not open doors if you wish to cage them. The vruul absorb the energy from Minor Elemental spells and part of Balefire (713). Vruul are immune to heat, vorteces are immune to cold. Vorteces are immune to most sorcery, but they both take damage from unfocused Energy Maelstrom (710).
Other information
The lesser vruul are relatively poor compared to the Sheruvian monks, who have no magical protection spells. Both the vruul and the vorteces will damage you if you try to touch them. Teleportation is somewhat inhibited near the Dark Shrine, Spirit Guide (130) will randomly fail sometimes. It will return you to the hooded figures or Sheruvian monastery, which can easily make you prone while locked in hard RT. Greater vruul swarm behind the two trapped doors in the monastery.
They only sniff the air, growl, and glare when you are dead. Lesser and greater vruul are indistinguishable other than level. There is no node for resting in the Broken Lands, but they usually do not wander into the secret room behind the tapestry.
Behind The Scenes
Vruul were originally called "gogor", a special kind of artificial being. They were invented by the Empress Kadaena, along with many dark races, and several other kinds of malevolent construct. ("Vruul" itself is likely an Iruaric portmanteau or composite glyphical form of "vuul" and "arul", meaning literally "The Enchanter's Sight", or more loosely "The Eyes of Kadaena.") The I.C.E. age form of Marlu (Morgu) was known for plundering ancient crypts, looking for gogor, his favored pets left over from the First Era of Shadow World. They slumbered in urns filled with a foul necrolytic fluid, and appear to be activated involving some brutal ritualistic sacrifice. Some gogor were able to fly off with their victims, but these ones cannot, being older than the mechanics for flying creatures. (This is likely a subtle allusion to the sleeping Cthulhu having vestigial wings that should have been incapable of flight.) They were not considered undead, but unholy is plausible. His obsession with them was never given a canonical explanation in the Shadow World source material. It was said that they survived the aeons in their dormant sleep until dark priests of later ages awoke them from their crypts.
It is impossible to understand the Dark Shrine, the work of Uthex Kathiasas, or the importance of the vruul without the obsolete lore as context. In the Shadow World history, the Dark Gods did not appear until the Second Era. Without being here in the First Era, there should be no link with Kadaena, or her Lord of Essaence followers from that period. Morgu has no obvious reason to care other than their resemblance. The significance of the "gogor" and Dark Shrine is in establishing this relationship between them both during and prior to the Wars of Dominion. Andraax notably wrote a poem addressing her dark creations that began with: "Once She whispered and life was death. Gogur arose, his wide wings spread. Talons to tear and fangs to feed, the skies were darkened with dread." This can be interpreted for us as "Gogur" referring to Morgu, the archaic form of Marlu, as being made ("spirit born of death") as her servant and master of her gogor. There is possibly an implicit relationship between him and a contemporary "servant of the Shadow" called the Master of Malice.
The invoking element to the Dark Shrine was: "Morgu lyxatis kort. Thro dyar K'mur." The loose translation of The Temple of Darkness Poem from what was presumably also Iruaric was "Morgu, Cruel Master. Guard the Dark Queen." (The existence of this poem in the ruins of another temple of the Dark Lords implies its authenticity.) More literally, "lyxatis" means something like "one who is the act of causing dread", or "dread incarnate." "Kort" means "master", but Morgu is the servant in this context, more like "the master's dread" or "the dread who masters [my servants]." Cruelty would better be rendered as Malice. "dyar K'mur" is a subtle play on words. While it means "dark female Lord", or Lords of Essaence, the so-called "Queen of Evil" who was said to have created the gogor was actually the Empress Kadaena. K'daen or Kaeden itself means "queen", which were another of her foul constructs, with Kadaena as "high queen" or "Empress." Thus, the translation is more accurately a command, which can be pointedly rendered as: "Dread Morgu, Guard Kadaena."
This implies a relationship between the Lords of Essaence and the Dark Gods dating back to the First Era. Iruaric was the language of the Lords of Essaence, and would otherwise be out of place when speaking about the Dark Gods. However, there is another play on words, given the literal meaning of "dyar K'mur." The Charon (Lornon) deities were known as the "Dark Lords", and "Lady of Darkness" was the specific epithet of Orgiana (Eorgina). Orgiana was not the queen of their pantheon in the archaic theology, and resided at the time in the Black Hel with a theocracy run by the daughter of Kadaena. The Dark Path called Kadaena the "Guardian of the Forbidden", which was contemporary with her daughter, with the crypt's design being based on the temple of her theocracy. "Thro dyar K'mur" in this context means roughly the same thing as the chant "Throk Farok".
Morgu was originally a "Dark Spirit", similar to the Great Spirit Vult (Voln), which were extensions of will of the Dark Lords. It would thus make no sense for Kadaena to have made Morgu unless she was herself one of the Dark Lords. Interestingly, the poem alludes to Orgiana as the "Mother" of darkness, which plays off Morgu being "born" to guard the Dark Queen. It conflates her identity with Kadaena, who used Ordainers as bodyguards. Orgiana herself was known for fashioning demonic races out of mutilated spirits and for having her own dark host of demi-god spirit servants. The "repose in silent waiting" line of the poem plays off the Temple of Burning Night poems calling Kadaena the "sleeping queen" who "spurns death." The cultists whose souls powered the vruul are interred in "silent repose" in the Dark Shrine. Regardless, the invoking element should not have been made in the First Era, being an intra-language transliteration of ancient Iruaric. Since The Dark Path might have ultimately owed its fealty to Orgiana, it is quite possible that Morgu was using the Dark Shrine in the Wars of Dominion.
The Dark Grotto by implication did not exist until after the magru, and the water by the stairs now is actually an obscure warding against Morgu. However, if the cavern and huge staircase were engineered with magru they should be much older, and so the Dark Shrine would have already been present. The temporal paradox of the inscription is that it implies conditions spanning both the past and future from the time of The Dark Path. It is possible to resolve this by considering the allusions to "The Shadow out of Time", which would imply Kadaena made the shrine in antiquity but used a future form of Iruaric with the invoking element. In this sense they were all still her servants, long after her death, in the Wars of Dominion.
The Dark Gods were speculated by some Loremasters, like Uthex Kathiasas, of originating in "failed" Lord of Essaence experiments with creating non-corporeal life. (Others thought they escaped from an interdimensional prison, which may be what The Broken Lands represents.) Similarly, surviving followers of Kadaena were said to have created Great Demons, who were also demi-gods like the Dark Spirits. These followers of Kadaena were known to have worked with the Dark Gods during the Wars of Dominion. Uthex was killed in the same year one of them conquered this whole region. "The Legend of the Necropolis of Etrevion" also preserved a typo implying Kadaena was herself the first moon goddess.
The Dark Shrine itself is an allusion to Kadath from "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath". Among the borrowed features include the sheer vertical cliffs, the grottoes and frescoes, being on the moon, the fluorescent fungi, the bone pit, the boulder strewn plain, and especially the huge stairs leading up the dark tower of a great demon (whose symbol in bas-relief made one shudder without knowing its meaning. The steps led to a portal returning to the enchanted woods, forbidden to the ghouls, reflected by the forest in The Graveyard.) This associates Morgu with the same Old One premise as the Ordainer symbolism below the Graveyard. The lesser vruul lore reflects the "night-gaunts" who haunted the "peaks of Throk" in the dream underworld. The night-gaunts would refuse to fly over bodies of water, which thus contains the vruul in the same way it repels Morgu himself. They guarded the caves of the mountain Ngranek, where the gods of earth lived before ascending to Kadath, which had tunnels descending to the underworld.
When the vruul generate they "lope" into the room, likely an allusion in context to the narrator asking his ghouls ("dog-like lopers") to gather a swarm of night-gaunts to frighten off the shantaks over Leng, as well as witnessing mountain sized heads "lope" in the distance on their flight to Kadath. This corresponds to the eye windows in the Dark Shrine. The night-gaunts had vision all over their bodies. Consequently, "lyxatis" can be interpreted as a glottalization of "lyxarulis", meaning "dread seers." The translation of the Dark Shrine inscription in this case becomes: "Marlu, Master of the Vruul." This is remarkable because Marlu's original post-I.C.E. Age gods lore gave him the title "master of the vruul", which was also when the roles of Kadaena and Origiana explicitly merged into Eorgina. The Broken Lands has a motif of omniscience, possibly associating Kadaena with Yog-Sothoth.
References
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