On the shores of Mandle Maar, where oak trees grow scraggly and tangled and the broken-glass of the crunching shore dazzles blindingly in the sunlight, it's said that maggots have learned to walk like men, and learned all the vices and cruelties of men besides.
Not so - they were always men, but have grown soft and white like maggots. They go about under moonlight, when the shore is not so blinding, and fatten themselves on acorn bread slathered with stolen victuals.
They're led by a man named Cornhat Vaukes (fighter 3) who wears a wide hat woven from bristling grain-stalks. He flies upon a redwood-handled scythe which must be nightly fed the blood of a red cat which has drank the milk of a red mare, or else it grows dangerously rebellious. Going about so he scouts out targets for his banditry, and leads pursuers into trips and falls.
The red mare Vaukes keeps for milk has dropped in its output - he killed the mare's previous stallion after he caught it laughing at the size of his testicles while urinating. He has not found a worthy replacement yet, but would pay premium for one.
Vaukes' back is tattooed with the 47 names of the Miserable Sisters of Pox, which marks him as immune to all diseases which mar the skin, and strikes any who read the names with the diseases which he has shrugged away.
In contrast to the plump cheeks and bellies of his men Vaukes is rail-thin - he will go without eating so that they can eat more, because he fears being abandoned above all other fearful things.
The Maggoty Men are composed of three companies, who share their loot, a hideout, and the leadership of Cornhat Vaukes, but otherwise loathe each other.
The first company are the lepers, who number ten, and love Vaukes for going among them unbothered (his tattoos render him immune to leprosy). They wrap themselves head to toe in soft rags (surprise 3-in-6), and wield their heavy bells on the ends of ropes, the tongues torn out. They are tasked with kidnapping the red cats Vaukes needs for his magic scythe, and have taken up the habit of meowing to each other, to amuse themselves and unnerve others.
The lepers are led by Richter Rictus (leper 2), whose lips have rotten away entirely. He is a devotee of the corpse-god Muckle Jezza, and inlays skulls with chips of colourful volcanic glass he picks off the shore of Mandle Maar to express this devotion. He claims to become possessed by the god while drunk, and is drunk often, and makes crude jokes and shouts out his love for his god-wife Wee Jas. He wants to convince Cornhat Vaukes of the power of this worship, and share a feast of human flesh which will turn them into immortal ghouls.
The second company are the remnants of wizard-priests who once tended the spiritual fence that hemmed in a worm of draconic aspect which sleeps under Mandle Maar. Once it writhed, and the land overflowed with its fire, but the predecessors of the wizard-priests drove it back beneath the water of the Maar. The worm tested their fence, failed, and drifted into the long, low slumber in which it remains to this day. Without the pressing of its threat, the wizard-priests lost their funding and dwindled into the rogues they now are.
They number six, and are led by Conservatrix Syperasae the Fifth (abjurer wizard 3 - and all the others are abjurer wizards 1). She bears a staff of knotted oak-wood, the symbol of her abandoned station, which has one end carved to resemble the head of a pike, and the other the head of an eagle. Tapping the eagle's head to the waters of Mandle Maar renders them hard as stone for 10 feet around. Tapping the pike's head to the earth surrounding Mandle Maar renders it soft as water for 10 feet around. Away from Mandle Maar these powers of the staff are reduced to mere cantrips.
Syperasae dreams of the sleeping worm, and how she can wake it, and bind it to her service. She works for Cornhat Vaukes only for her share of plunder, which she gives to her agents to go beyond the Maar in disguise and spend on occultry, that she might gain a better understanding and capability for this binding.
The pillar-like standing stones of the spirit-fence still remain dotted around the Maar, mostly intact - the Maggoty Men carve graffiti into them to indicate their plans and movements to each other.
The third company of the Maggoty Men are deserters from the army of Lord Insherrn, who once fought alongside Vaukes as fellows before he was Cornhat. They bear traitor-brands on their faces, and noose-rashes around their necks - Vaukes cut them down atop his scythe in the nick of time, and they stopped being fellows and started being followers since.
The leader of these deserters, a company fifteen strong, is Barys (fighter 2), who snarls poisoned needles in his beard, and throws them with great force and less accuracy. His horse is a strong swimmer, and leads the way for the paddled rafts of the rest. They doubt the loyalty of Vaukes, and press him to commit ever-more foul deeds to truss him to them through shared sin.
