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. 

The Legion of Gold

 The Legion of Gold is the largest, oldest, alliance of Outsiders in the Lower Planes, predating the creation of the Tanar'ri and the foundation of Baator. Indeed, it is the largest, oldest alliance in the entire multiverse. The Laws of Heaven were only ideas, and mortals mere beasts, when the Legion was founded. The members of the Legion call themselves 'Soldiers of Gold'.

The word for that epithet in Old Infernal is Yugoloth. 

The Yugoloths are not a species. 

    They are a polity, an army, a disparate, self-cannibalising, disloyal, destructive, heaving legion, constructed of the myriad castoff Fiendish kinds created by those ancient avatars of true evil, the Baernaloths. Even the evil of the Abyss pales compared to their foul campaign across creation, waged since magic was young. 

    Among their numbers they count many loyal strains of fiends - the leadercaste called 'Ultroloth', or 'Masterful Soldier', or the low-ranking thugs referred to as the 'Dhergoloth', or 'Hungry Soldiers', for example. 

    These species have their own names, but they are unknown to mortals, perhaps even to their fellows in the Legion. 

Some, less loyal, who are neither Tanar'ri nor Baatezu, drift closer to their orbit - the Oni of Acheron, the Concubi of the Abyss, the Ravaasta of Hades (who are called 'Arcanoloths' by some). 

    Every kind of fiend - exiled Tanar'ri, hideous Vaporighu, defecting Baatezu, bizarre Maelephants, secretive Gehreleths, scheming Night Hags, surviving Obyriths and even the supposedly independent Rakshasa, can count representatives within the Legion - and enemies without it. 

    What of the Legion's leadership? Certainly, the Ultroloths hold authority, and they hold above all their lord, the General of Gehenna. Supposedly, when the General sits upon the Siege Perilous, (his throne of petrified, living demons) which lies atop Khin-Oin, the Godbone Tower, the End of All Things will begin. 

Supposedly. 

In his absence, the High Oinoloth, a master plague-crafter, is scheming chancellor of the great tower. 

    The Legion's founders, the Baernaloths, embody a form of utterly apathetic, sociopathic evil - a kind of almost banal, low-level, omnidirectional hate, without passion.  

They saw everything but themselves as an object or a tool, to be taken, used, broken, and discarded. They do not lead the Legion - indeed, most fear it, as almost all of the ancient Baernaloths met their end at the blades and claws of their spawn. 

    It was this first rebellion that inspired the Baernaloths to create the Books of Keeping,  ancient tomes, now lost, which contained in their four-hundred and forty four volumes the names of every member of the Legion. 

Most were burnt by the vengeful 'Loths, and, by now, the Legion's numbers far exceed such paltry records. 

The potential of the Books as a weapon against the Legion is a strange and baseless rumour - some say spread by the Yugoloths themselves, to decieve their adversaries. 

    What of their laws? They hold none, not any more, none but the Law of Gold, the reason and excuse for the Legion's mercenary actions across the Multiverse.

None judge a Canoloth for guarding a vault in the City of Doors. None judge an Arcanaloth that illicitly advises a Bytopian Sphinx on matters of magic. None judge an Ultroloth for leading an army across some Prime Plane. None would even judge a Dhergoloth for taking a contract to knit. 

So long as the Law of Gold is not broached - 'Nothing Costs Nothing'.

    The Legion think in expenditures and profits, an attitude beaten into them by millions of years of commerce, slavery and mercenerial wars. 

There are no mercenaries their equal in all creation. They act with professionalism, ruthlessness and skill (if not charm or class), as long as their payment persists. Mortals refer to the Primeval Pacts of Baator and the loose agreements of the Abyss as 'Contracts', but the Legion are the only fiendish organisation with a specialist caste of contract lawyers (The Yagnoloths). 

    They are not the teeming horde of the Abyss, nor the faceless myrmidons of Hell. They are the elite. They use all the most modern technology - the average Ultroloth wields a jezail armed with silver shot, alongside the traditional longsword. 

The conflict to which they devote most of their time is the eternal Blood War, a conflict which many accuse them of both sparking and prolonging, for their benefit. 

To the average mortal, for whom greed and violence are common, the Legion are at once the most understandable, and the most reprehensible of all the Fiends.