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Gr'z'tok

The mighty Gr'z'tok is something of an oddity within the corpus of ELotH works in that whilst his axe, his fortress and his his domain all feature in either the books or the CCG, he himself does not.

Gr'z'tok was the eldest child of the Highland Widdlestok Clan and was originally named Gregory Fuzzle Widdlestok by his loving parents. This led to an unhappy childhood which ended dramatically one day thanks to the advice of his school careers officer. At her suggestion he murdered both of his parents, amended his name with generous application of apostrophes and embarked upon a the life of a villain.

Before long he became High Chief of the Highland Valleys. It is unclear whether he became Gr'z'tok the Blood Bearded as a result of getting gore in his whiskers during the conquest or simply because the flavour text writers for the CCG were feeling particularly unsubtle one day.

Having claimed his crown, Gr'z'tok set out on a villainous quest (which is the evil equivalent of a heroic quest) to recover the legendary weapon Mortalkill. Despite this being a blatant attempt to persuade the publishers than he was worth a novel of his own, it failed. As such, whilst we know he obtained the axe, we have no idea how.

One of the troubles with being a High Chief is that there's always a niggling worry that someone elsewhere in the world might be somehow higher than you. So it was that Gr'z'tok formed a devious plan. He called together all the highest rulers of the world and declared himself to be Lord over them all. Well, that was his initial plan at least. It then occurred him him that there was likely to be a great deal less trouble if he didn't actually tell them. Thus did he become Lord of the Overrulers with remarkably little difficulty.

In actuality this strategy was years ahead of its time and arguably constitutes the first viral marketing campaign in ELotH history. Bards and minstrels heard of Gr'z'tok's title and didn't think to question it. By the time the other Overrulers heard they had a Lord it seemed a bit unwise to argue in case it looked too much like a rebellion. After all, rebelling against blood-bearded lords is known to cause your life insurance premiums to go up. And nobody wants that.

Gr'z'tok was eventually defeated by High Priestess Phyllana of Arkleaf at the Siege of Arkleaf, but he was a bit embarassed by that, so we won't talk about it here.