[Gaunt]

Hail Eomer and other Warg devotees!
Today I bring you the cruel and terrible tale of the Warg-a-tron, a tale of anguish and suffering the likes of which is rarely told.

Long ago, on the fringes of the Northern Wastes, lived a humble people in a humble village, the last of their humble clan whose lack of taste for conquest and violence had seen their numbers gradually dwindle so that they could only fill one village. For years they had been untroubled, believing that they were too peaceful to make enemies and that they had too little to attract raiders to such an inhospitable region.

But a few years before the brutal climax of this tale, people of the village had begun to see shapes and shadows as they foraged in nearby woods and hills. Sometimes the shapes could be seen in the moolight, slinking packs of huge, sharptoothed quadrupeds moving with an air of extreme menace.

A wise old man of the village proclaimed these creatures to be Wargs, fearsome creatures he had learned of in his youth from a man even older than he. The villagers came to fear the Wargs more than anything, though they rarely saw them, and never in the clear light of day.

One man in the village, a somewhat undistinguished magician, bravely swore to protect the villagers from the Warg threat. He set about creating charms and spells to ward off the beasts. But every thing he tried failed spectacularly, and sometimes to comical effect, such as the time he attempted to create a warg destroying beam emitter, a kind of anti warg death rod. Every time he tried to demonstrate this to the villagers, either nothing happened or he transformed into a ludicrous beast, part bird and part pig, and when he transformed back the villagers would pelt him with vegetables and chase him back to his hut on the outskirts of the village, laughing at the magician all the way.

As his attempts at magic continued and the vilagers laughed at him more and more, the magician began to turn from his noble quest and turn his energies towrards his loathing of the ungrateful villagers. He moved out of the village into the nearby hills and set about his new life's work, something that would turn out to be the greatest but most despicable of his magical achievements.

The magician met a band of travelling rogues one day in the hills, and by lying about his prowess with magic they agreed to have him join their party as they attempted to raid a goblin hoard. By letting out a few theatrical flashes and bangs in the midst of the combat the magician managed to convince the rogues he had played a major part in their victory, and he was given a large share of the loot.

With this gold he employed bandits to travel to the dwarven mines and bring him back vast quantities of metal. During this time he practiced the dark magical art of making inanimate objects come to life and reap destruction, and at this he proved far more adept than he ever was at the noble forms of magic he had previously tried to practice. On occasion his whole house was almost destroyed by a rock he managed to bring to life, before he mastered the art of directing the animated object's wrath against specific targets.

When the bandits returned with his metal, he paid them further to construct his ultimate weapon of death, according to his plans. They thought it was merely a statue, the whim of a rich, crazed old man, but it was far worse. For this abomination, the magician knew there was only one form he could choose. The fears of the villagers and the potential for irony after his spurned attempts to protect them were too much for the magician to resist. When the bandits completed their work and were paid off, leaving to return to their homelands, the magician gazed in wonder at his creation - a titanic metal Warg. He called this the Warg-a-tron.

Days later, unbeknownst to the villagers as they tended their crops, the Warg-a-tron came to life. The magician cast his spell and sent the immense beast to its dreadful work. The villagers heard a distant rumbling, and held each other, trembling. From over the crest of a hill, the Warg-a-tron strode... to be continued.