Gulgar

Once native to the Elemental Plane of Earth, gulgars migrated to the Material Plane long ago, fleeing an incursion of geniekind. They now live in temperate mountain ranges, riding the winds on the backs of yrthaks and plumbing the depths of the mountains, seeking the crystals they eat to give their bones strength.

Gulgars seem to be laconic and dour creatures, but in truth they are boisterous and full of vigor. Their speech is inaudible to most beings, and they are wary of strangers⁠—​especially of dwarves, a race with which they’ve had many conflicts in the past. This disguises the gulgars’ true nature, but their oafish bravura in combat reveals their real personalities.

A gulgar stands a little over 6 feet tall and weighs 250 to 350 pounds. Gulgars have dark gray skin, with males tending to be darker than females. As they age, females grow paler and males grow darker, making very old gulgars white or black. The crystalline bone that protrudes from their skin yellows with age, becoming cloudy and opaque.

Gulgars cannot vocalize speech in the normal range of hearing and make few vocal noises other than the “guhlgaar” sound of their sonic pulse (for which they were named). Instead, they communicate in tones too low in frequency for most beings to hear. Gulgars speak Terran.

Gulgars prefer to ride yrthaks into combat. They tame and enslave these magical beasts using their sonic pulses and train them to take gulgar riders into battle. When mounted on a yrthak, a gulgar uses its longbow or a lance (2d6+7/×3, or 4d6+14/×3 on a mounted charge) to attack foes. It uses its sonic pulse only when it can do so without catching the yrthak in the blast.

On the ground, a gulgar charges boldly into combat, beginning combat with its Powerful Charge. In following rounds it strikes with its warhammer and uses its horn to gore a foe. Gulgars enjoy employing bull rush and overrun attacks to move about the battlefield and push foes off the cliffs of their mountain homes. If a foe possesses a weapon that easily pierces its crystalline skin, a gulgar might throw down its shield, grip its warhammer with both hands (for a total of +7 damage), and make a sunder attempt.

Crystalline Bone (Ex): A gulgar’s slam and gore attacks are treated as adamantine for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction and hardness.

The protrusions of crystal from a gulgar’s knuckles, chin, and shoulders are made of an organic material that is as hard as adamantine, but it turns as brittle as quartz when detached from the gulgar.

Sonic Pulse (Ex): As a standard action, a gulgar can emit a 30-foot cone of sound that deals 3d6 points of sonic damage and may deafen foes. Any creature in the area must succeed on a DC 18 Fortitude save or be deafened for 1 hour. Deafened creatures cannot be further deafened, but they still take the sonic damage from other sonic pulse attacks.

Once it has used this ability, a gulgar must wait 1d4 rounds before using it again. This is a sonic effect. The save DC is Constitution-based.

Stability (Ex): A gulgar gains a +4 bonus on ability checks made to resist being bull rushed or tripped when standing on the ground (but not when climbing, riding a flying mount, or otherwise not standing firmly on the ground).

Subsonic Speech (Ex): A creature must have the tremorsense ability, or the blindsight or blindsense ability based on a keen sense of hearing or sensitivity to vibrations, to hear the subsonic speech of gulgars. Such creatures can hear the subsonic speech of gulgars using the normal Listen check rules; they do not need to have the speaking gulgar within the range of their tremorsense, blindsense, or blindsight ability.

A gulgar’s subsonic speech carries five times as well and as far as normal speech. This means that to hear a gulgar talking, a creature who can hear the subsonic speech takes a −1 penalty on Listen checks per 50 feet of distance from the speaker. A door increases the Listen DC by just 1, and a stone wall increases it by 3. These modifiers replace those given the Listen skill description.

Creatures without the ability to hear the subsonic speech of gulgars can still read their lips using the Spot skill. The base DC to read a gulgar’s lips is 20, and the creature reading lips must speak Terran.

Skills: Gulgars have poor vision but possess an excellent sense of hearing. They have a +4 racial bonus on Listen checks and a −4 racial penalty on Spot checks.

Gulgars live in tribes in and around the cliffs that yrthaks typically nest in. When they came to the Material Plane, the gulgars encountered yrthaks and found them to be tractable creatures due to their vulnerability to sonic effects and reliance on hearing to sense prey. Many yrthaks now serve gulgar tribes as mounts and beasts of burden. Although some do so for the protection and food a gulgar tribe provides, most are enslaved and serve out of fear of the gulgars’ sonic pulse attacks.

Gulgars exist on a subsistence level. Although they are omnivorous, they hunger for the crystals that they once consumed on the Elemental Plane of Earth, constantly mining and exploring caverns in search of fine crystals. Their work often brings up metal ore, which they craft into armor, weapons, and crude sculptures that tell the story of their flight from the Elemental Plane of Earth and their great foes, the genies. Their digging often brings them into contact with other subterranean creatures. If such creatures don’t inhibit the gulgars in their efforts, the gulgars pay them no heed; if they try to stop the gulgars or attack them, bitter conflict is always the result.

A gulgar’s favored class is fighter, but most gulgar leaders are rangers or druids. Gulgar rangers often choose humanoids (dwarves) and magical beasts as their favored enemies. Few gulgars are clerics, but those who are can choose from the Animal, Earth, Protection, and Strength domains.

In the Eberron campaign setting, gulgars originally came from Lamannia, the Twilight Forest. They are most often encountered near the eastern peaks of the Mror Holds, bordering the Lhazaar Principalities, although wyverns and manticores pose a constant threat. They periodically trade with the Mror Holds dwarves, offering livestock in exchange for crystals.

Gulgar tribes are found throughout the Sunrise Mountains that form the western border of the Endless Wastes. However, all surface-dwelling gulgars can trace their origins back to a series of large enclaves carved into the walls of the Ramparts of Night, a subterranean abyss in a region of the Underdark known as the Earthroot (located under Thay).