Zrund’bokki

All duardin are creatures of rock and stone. Even the Kharadron in their mighty airships make their way in the world by hunting clouds of aether-gold, and the Fyreslayers and Dispossessed make their homes in caverns cut into the earth itself. So it is with the Kol-Dawi, the twisted and cursed peoples known to some as ‘chaos duardin’. When the Ancestor Gods renounced the Kol-Dawi for their experimentation in magic, the other duardin peoples drove them to the furthest-flung corners of the Khazalid Empire, there to scratch out a living from whatever rock and mineral they could find. Unbeknownst to their erstwhile kinsfolk, the ashen plains contained many minerals, if one had the cunning and skill to find and refine them. In the early days, the Kol-Dawi performed this labour themselves; sifting panfulls of cinders and dirt for the glittering black grains of varanite and warpstone to trade with the slaves of the dark powers.

As the wealth of the Kol-Dawi grew, they sought an easier solution to supply their hunger for cursed realmstone. Their enslavement of the Khrobi’zkha, the hobgrots, allowed them to mine on a level never before seen. Entire tribes were set to their task, scrabbling in the dust for dark specks of rock to hand to their overseers. Even then, the ravenous desire of the dark powers outpaced the supply flowing to the ziggurats, and the Kol-Dawi turned to further methods to sate their need. Using bombs of blasting powder ignited with a small fuse of inferior warpstone, the mining gangs took to the ground beneath the ash plains, blowing craters and tunnels into the rock that pock-marked the land for miles around each ziggurat.

The use of blasting powder did not stop there, however. Accidental discharges of powder proved how efficacious powder was as a weapon, and soon the slave legions of the Kol-Dawi began to go forth with a corps of trained engineers - Zrund’bokki. Hurling fusillades of blasting charges, these maniacal and foolhardy grots can turn entire units into little more than smoking chunks of flesh. This work is very dangerous, and it is not uncommon to see hobgrots bearing peg legs, eye patches or hooks where a premature detonation has brutally maimed them.