Gnarox Blackhorn Champion Lore
Gnarox Blackhorn has ever turned his belligerence into success and the outrage of others into his own advantage. He was a bully and a gloater from his youngest days living on his parents farm. As a teen, he was attempting to geld an ornery bull when the animal turned on him. With only the small gelding knife to defend himself, Gnarox narrowly avoided impalement and through sheer luck managed to cut the beast’s throat. But in turn the death of the bull triggered his Skinwalker transformation.
Rejected by his family, Gnarox cut his teeth in the fighting arts as a mercenary, bodyguard, bandit, and pirate, dabbling in nearly every profession requiring frequent combat. Each time, however, he irritated his compatriots with boasts and rowdy horseplay, long arguments and bellowed tirades, greed, and lack of respect for his seniors. He was unceremoniously ejected from each group he aligned himself with after no longer than a few months.
His pirate days ended when his captain abandoned him in the Arena City of Velyzar. Gnarox soon realized that it was his natural home: a place of wealth, fame, vice, and corruption, all sustained by never-ending violence in the city’s world-famous stadia. He presented himself at one of the gladiator proving-grounds, and in his first demonstration match he broke the jaw, ribs, and femur of his sparring partner with only a pair of caestus on his fists. The recruiters saw his swaggering, boorish demeanor and shameless self—interest as the qualities of a perfect villain for the staged dramas of the arena.
Just as predicted, when Gnarox fought before the crowds, he became a loathed pariah — and a huge draw. Screaming patrons loved to hate him, praying for his downfall and attending his every match to root against him. Gnarox reveled in the attention and riled up the crowds to new heights of frenzy. He fought dirty in every way imaginable, with feints and false surrenders and fistfuls of dirt hurled in the eyes of his opponents. When boos and jeers rained down on him from the surrounding masses, he laughed and raised his hands over and over as if to ask the crowd for ever-louder outcry. When he won, it evoked a mix of hearty, enjoyable outrage and secret guilty pleasure from the onlookers. When he lost, the stadium erupted in cheers of joy, which Gnarox didn’t mind — their scorn would make his next victory all the sweeter.
Gnarox’s infamy reached new heights when he won a highly anticipated battle against Samson the Masher, a fellow Skinwalker. Samson’s public reputation had been steered and scripted towards honor and grace. He was billed as an avenger of wrongs and champion of the meek. Seeing him fall, if just barely, to the braying, cackling Gnarox drove the crowd into a frenzy that required the guards to restrain them from storming the field of combat.
Samson did not forget his defeat. He had a rival already, Quintus the Triumphant, but their animosity was completely false, a storyline for the crowds. His hatred of Gnarox was genuine, however, and their subsequent clashes, trading victories back and forth, only strengthened it. This turn in Gnarox’s career has attracted the attention of the great Diamant Coppercoin, the richest magnate of Velyzar and kingmaker among the gladiators.
Underneath all his shield-bashing clangor and mocking opprobrium, the undeniable truth is that Gnarox is an extremely skilled fighter. He excels at psychological warfare, using clever, personalized insults and derision to render his opponents so infuriated that they make numerous exploitable mistakes. Then he brings down his spiked mace, and with it, his foe.