Ravagers

Ravagers
Official art of a Ravager Stabby-Stabber and a Ravager Slaughter Lord, by Elisa Serio from Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn pg. 249.
Basic Information
Type	Cult
Base	Dividing Plains
Leaders	Four Slaughter Lords
Favored deity	Gruumsh Bane
Membership
Races	Various
Notable members	Grud the Great Kalydria Darkeye
Relationships
Enemies	Shields of the Plain Dustpaw tribe

The Ravagers are a death cult dedicated to Gruumsh the Ruiner located across Dividing Plains.

Society

They are rumored to be ruled by four Slaughter Lords leading four main branches of the horde. However, no one outside its ranks knows who is really in charge, the long-term plans of the horde, or even if they exist. Ravagers are fanatically devoted to their deity, The Ruiner, who grants the lords blessings, artificially enhancing them before the battles, and provides them with magic powers, allowing them to cast several spells.

Around the time of the founding of Turst Fields, a cell of Ravagers seeking favor with Yeenoghu, Demon Lord of Slaughter used demon ichor to mutate a number of the hyenas of the Plains into gnolls to attack the new village. This plan backfired when the gnolls, upon drawing blood, were filled with anguish and turned against their creators. Thereafter they became the Dustpaw gnolls and integrated as trusted members of that community.

One branch of the Ravagers, led by the elf Kalydria Darkeye, has created a fort within the Bramblewood Forest. There they performed a ritual to transform the local giant spiders into demonfeed spiders. Another branch led by the half-elf/half-dragonborn Grud the Great is highly organized and instead worships Bane the Strife Emperor, and plans to march on the village of Turst Fields.

Behind the scenes

In the Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting sourcebook, the Ravagers were overwhelmingly orcs and their goblin slaves, with other goblinoids also sometimes involved.

In the "Explorer's Guide to Wildemount Q&A and Fireside Chat with Matthew Mercer" (Sx53), Matthew Mercer discussed the process that led to the reconsideration of the how orcs and the marauders of Tal'Dorei were depicted:

“

I've been in a discussion for a while amongst a lot of creators in this space that orcs were-- always got the shaft, even though where they were born from, and really came to prominence in the Lord of the Rings as this kind of-- this idea of industrialization and the evil of, in many ways, of an exploitive capitalist society. A lot of that also lent to orcs being an unnecessarily lambasted and evil-touted entity in a lot of media. I fell into that as well. I grew up reading Lord of the Rings, and in all the media I consumed the orcs were just bad, and it isn't until you begin to expand your horizons and see other people's perspectives that there's a lot of inherent cultural coding in them that makes it important to ensure that you don't continue to-- and as best as you can, to continue to enforce those unnecessary elements, and so that was something that we had discussed not wanting to do anyway, especially a part of the way I built this world intentionally was to bring our world away from the idea that there is good and evil inherently within people.

And while the first game was much more black-and-white, that was more from a narrative base, and finding creatures that were more classically monstrous and easy to fit into that space. With Wildemount I wanted to explore the aspect of evil as-- morality is relative, but evil is born from experience and intent, not from bloodline. Not from lineage. So when we came around to making this book, it was very important that we've managed to steer away from that classic idea of the orcs. Even the marauders that we had situated in Tal'Dorei's campaign guide, which was meant to be just one facet, but even then, there were facets of that book that were lazy, looking back on it. I'm not necessarily very proud of that. And so, that's part of the learning process as well. [...] So it was-- yeah, it was not necessarily challenging, because I think we were all excited to do that. It was just finding the right way to do it from a lore standpoint. And since the mechanics have already been toyed with on the Wizards of the Coast side, it made it an easier fit for us to find something we were happy with and put in the book.

”

– 

Matthew Mercer

[!h]

There is still a brief reference to goblin Ravagers in the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, but the sourcebook laid out a social, rather than inherited, explanation for some orcs' behavior. And in the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, moreover, the Ravagers have their roots in a goliath herd, are composed of people of many races like firbolgs and humans, and it is explicitly their "choices, not their ancestries," that make them evil.

References

Art: