The Maug

The Maug are one of the many strange species to be found marching the iron cubes of Acheron, The Eternal Battlefield.

The Maug are, apparently, artificial. Nobody – not the Reaves, the Bladelings, or Bane himself – consider them to be native to Acheron. The Maug themselves are reticent on the subject, but their implications seem to agree.

 

Perhaps they’re the project of some mad Prime wizard? A Baatezu soldier-caste gone wrong? The other project of the Obyriths? Exiles from the Legion of Hell? These ideas swirl and twist with no evidence or end in sight. Perhaps there is some link with their name being a homograph of the Giantish word for sin?

These are curiosities for Sigilite scholars. For those in Acheron, the Maug are simply there, and are a fact of life.

 

And what facts! Each Maug is exactly twelve and a half feet tall, looming above the height range of even the largest Ogres and Trolls. They are heavy, boxy, massively built – and their ‘skin’, such as it is, is a heavy, black stone, apparently some mutant kind of iron ore.

Their interiors, however, are flesh. This can be seen from the uncomfortably human, lidless eyeballs lurking in their sunken sockets, and the row of massive incisors inside the hinged jaw.

One of the Maug’s most interesting features are their interchangeable limbs – many Maug collect useful arms, often scavenged from other Maug that have fallen on the battlefields. The Maug lack family lines, and instead trace ancestry based on who owned their arm last. Maug with many spare arms are linked to many families. The arms are often marked by each owner, so each arm is in effect a family tree for the Maug that wears it.

 

Here is the old mini for the 3.5 Maug.
Imagine this but with meat at the joints
and unnerving, lidless eyes. 

Dissection of a dead Maug reveals a rudimentary, vestigial digestive system, a massive heart, eight sets of rubbery lungs, and muscle, muscle, muscle. Their bones are steel, as they have both an endo- and exo-skeleton. They lack gender, and their method of reproduction is unknown or non-existent. All known Maug are old, and being old on Acheron makes you a veteran.

 

Maug have an interesting psionic ability – they can link their minds to that of the commander under whom they are serving, able to immediately receive and carry out orders. The level of autonomy the Maug have during this ‘command trance’ is under constant debate, and the Maug themselves seem reticent to clarify.

 

Like most others living on Avalas (the first layer of Acheron) the Maug organise into massive Legions, which are, in essence, mobile polities modelled after Bane’s Great Divine Army and the Legion of Hell (Yugoloths).

These Legions provide mercenary services off-plane or fight endless battles to gain and maintain territory on-plane. Maug territories tend to be dull, boxy, and covered in layered wall-and-trench defenses, sized to fit the big lugs.

The primary Maug Legion is called the Collective. This is a huge structure of Maug, all within a circular, self-linked command trance – in effect, a hive mind. The Collective could almost be considered a Maug-based computer. Its intellect and capacity for calculation far surpasses the breadth, speed and detail of even gods.

The Maug use it to track expenditures and weapon maintenance schedules.

Who or whatever made the Maug, they did not give to them that most mortal of talents: creativity. The Maug are utterly dull, recycling the same six types of interchangeable arm down through history. Their art is made of up of lines and numbers depicting troop movements. Their poetry (a concept introduced to them by the Reaves) is, in effect, literal descriptions of whatever a given Maug can see. Excellence is painstaking accuracy in each description.

The meticulous detail and unswerving honesty of these ‘poets’ has led to the utterly barmy occurrence of Maug War Reporters for the embattled news-rags of the City of Doors.

 

The Maug have begun to recently adopt names – they can instinctually recognise each other, another psionic power they share, but the same is not true for other folk they deal with. Most Maug call themselves [Colour][Metal][Number], usually with no rhyme or reason. Maug will never call themselves ‘Green’, as this colour is not present on Acheron. If you showed something green to a Maug, they would call it ‘Verdigris’.

Some example Maug names:

Red Iron 47

Umber Steel 91

Verdigris Bronze 11 (A famous commander and “eccentric”)  

Pearl Silver 9

Blue Adamant 804

Much like their Reave neighbours, the Maug are an increasing presence across the multiverse - for good, or for ill.