Bowf the Rancid Champion Lore
As far as he is concerned, Bowf is still the dapper, witty, consummate professional that he always was — only suffering from an ‘unfortunate ailment’, a ‘chronic condition,’ that he does his best to ‘rise above.’ In some ways one might call it an admirable mentality for a Skinwalker to have, but, in others, it is a sad delusion. There is a reason why he is called — out of earshot — ‘the Rancid’.
Bowf was a Dwarf who lived in the Age of Treachery. A perfumer by trade, Bowf had a remarkable nose and talent for matching scent with scent. The wealthy Dwarves of the Skyiron Dominion loved his creations, but Bowf was determined to bring his craft to new heights by searching the world for exotic aromatics. After several years topside, the handsome, strutting cad had become enamored with the surface, declaring that the sun had done wonders for his complexion.
He was once consulted by an Elven noblewoman and designed her a personalized fragrance. Unbeknownst to him, the Elf was carrying on a secret love affair. The husband, when he found out, blamed Bowf for stoking his wife’s vanity and aiding her amorous pursuits with fine scents. He hired a group of young Orc laborers to find Bowf and humiliate him, as he had been. The youths captured a large Aravian skunk and lay in wait on a country road where they knew Bowf was traveling in his carriage. When he passed by, they hurled the creature into its open window. The now agitated skunk sprayed noxious chemicals everywhere, where it mixed with Bowf’s already overpowering perfume to create a caustic smog. The Dwarf panicked, and kicked and stomped the creature until he broke its back and crushed its skull.
The coach-driver halted at the commotion. When he opened the carriage door, a stinking cloud cleared to reveal Bowf in the throes of a Skinwalker transformation, growing striped, black-and-white fur. The once-proud Dwarf expelled his own stench-spray, horrifying the driver, then bolted in an atavistic panic into the nearby woods. When Bowf finally regained his senses, his sensitive nose was clouded with the overpowering reek of his own secretions, his career as a purveyor of delightful scents apparently ruined.
But Bowf refused to accept his new reality. He used what ingredients he still had to create new, overpoweringly cloying perfumes and doused himself with them regularly, desperate to overwrite his stench. He continued to comport himself as a refined gentleman, though townsfolk he encountered recoiled from him. Even Skinwalker sympathizers consoled him only at several paces’ distance covering their noses with rags.
They directed him to a hidden network of Skinwalker resistance fighters across Anhelt who were training as guerrillas for an anticipated Gaellen Pact invasion. Bowf made their cause his own, considering it an ‘enlightening diversion’. When the Gaellens invaded, the Telerian League also had to deal with partisan uprisings in their midst, and memorable among the insurrectionists was a noxious being whose chemical weapons brought lasting pain and disgust to those he unleashed them upon.
Bowf was swept with the Gaellens back to the City of Dreams after their invasion floundered. He was later trapped in the City’s last desperate stand after the Telerian League’s successful counter-invasion. There, he shared his knowledge of sabotage and resistance hard-earned in Anhelt with the Gaellen holdouts, and for the first time others seemed grateful to have him around. Knowing what it was like to be rejected, he was one of few who befriended the mutant rat Skinwalker, Scabrius, and against the odds they escaped the carnage unfolding in the City.