D&d expedition to the demonweb pits cover art

Recca despaired of ever teaching the boy proper practicality. The apprentice's devotion was based on a strange sense of honor that he cherished deep inside his soul. They had been companions through many long, silent missions-teacher and student, leader and learner. Recca had taught the boy to fight, to track, to hunt, and above all to think. He had taken on this apprentice because the boy looked like he had the devotion to listen and learn. Recca was charismatic, a cavalier, dapper and sly, cunning and adored. He also had a single student, an apprentice as unlike him as iron was to silk: brooding, massive, humorless, a man who no longer had a name. His sword, jet black with a wolf skull pommel, was sharp enough to carve a war-horse in two.ДЄs Iuz's war ground to an end, Recca had eleven followers remaining-rangers and battle-mages hardened in this thankless war. His blade struck faster than thought, and he moved through a fight as if it were a dance. He had taught the art of the blade for three hundred years, taking only the most dedicated, most cunning, and most perfect students. Of all the war band leaders, the most savage, the most daring, was Recca-swordmaster and last lord of the grass elves. There was a power that came with action, an intensity that became a drug, intoxicating and addictive. But for some, the fight and slaughter had been sweet. These were the last days of the war, a time when a man could lay low and know that the horror soon would pass. Exhausted, harried, and dying man by man, the freedom fighters continued to fight, knowing they had won. Iuz turned inward, pruning his conquering armies of men, and the humans, elves, and dwarves from the surrounding nations began to hammer the demons back, step by step. The rest fought with ten times the fury, morning, noon, and night. Half their numbers had died in a few short weeks. Iuz had abandoned his plans of conquest to hunt for the roving bands of freedom fighters. The tide had finally turned against them. They had failed to protect their own people-and now they paid for it with their suicidal struggle. Leaving nothing but corpses in their wake, they mutilated even their own dead to render them useless to Iuz's necromancers. They fought endlessly, viciously, with infinite cunning and utterly without mercy. Iuz stripped troops from the conquering armies to try to stamp out the enemies within, and still the killers struck. Soon it took entire regiments to escort a single messenger, and supply columns were convoyed by legions of guards. Wells were poisoned and roads strewn with traps. The homeless warriors tore into Iuz's supply columns, slaughtered his couriers, and assassinated his scouts. The armies had moved on, and behind them a scattered handful of rangers rose to fight. The armies of Iuz had come-demons and rotting corpses covered by vast clouds of carrion flies-leaving the once-fertile lands covered in slime and ash. They had been formed from the hard, silent men of the wilds, the rangers who had failed to protect the borders and the sacred wilderness, the men who had been guardians but who had been helpless against the demon hordes. The roving bands of freedom fighters were good at slaughter. Iuz had stormed forward with his undead monsters, slaughtering everything in his path, but in the lands behind him, he had unknowingly left a cancer that gnawed at his heart. Men, women, children, and animals had been butchered, then raised as rotting, shambling legions of the damned. The hordes of Iuz had swept over villages, towns, and cities, obliterating those who fled from them. A war where small bands of men made the minions of Iuz pay for their deeds in blood. Harsh, pitiless, and savage, a war without rest, without honor, without glory.

D&d expedition to the demonweb pits cover art