Gorm

For the Æsir warrior, see Gorm (Æsir).

Gorm was a legendary Pictish chieftan who dreamed of leading his people to conquest over the western nations.

Background & History
As all Picts, Gorm was born in a mud-walled wattle-roofed hut. His life was not unusual to his people. However, Gorm had greater vision and ambition

When he was about 25 years old, Arus, a Nemedian missionary, had come to the Pictish Wilderness to civilize the Picts and teach them the ways of Mitra. While others before him were tortured and sacrified, Gorm accepted and listened to him. Both Arus and Gorm were practical men; Arus compared the lives of the Picts to the prosperous Hyborian kingdoms. He taught them to smelt iron and steel in the hopes of helping them make tools and established contact between them and Aquilonia. However, Gorm and the Picts heard his stories of luxury and dreamed of plunder, and used metallurgy to build weapons and armour instead of tools.

Gorm soon used the knowledge to subjugate the other savage Pictish clans and became their king, the first they ever had since the sinking of Atlantis. Arus was killed by a drunken Pict, but Gorm honored his benefactor by executing him and adorned Arus's grave with his murderer's skull.

Deep into his old age, Gorm was ready for his conquest, his ambitions to conquer the seemingly decadent west undimmed. His people flooded out of the jungles, wreaking havoc, passing over the Bossonian Marches and conquering Aquilonia and Ophir. His overthrow of the Hyborian civilization was halted at the Nemedian border, however, and his people were never able to subdue the barbaric Cimmerians.

Opposing to the Picts was the eastern empire of the Hyrkanians who vanquished the Hyborian civilization simultaneously. Gorm's Picts clashed on the Hyrkanians's western borders and gnarled at each other over the world they had conqered.

In his old age, Gorm was a ferocious, elemental savage who shattered a civilization without establishing a new one in its place. Always interested in his primal instincts, he sat on golden thrones in the palaces he ruined, and gnawed joints of beef presented to him on golden dishes by naked slave-girls who were the daughters of kings.

Gorm was slain about a 100 years old by chief Hialmar of the Aesir fighting for the Nemedians. Later his empire would fall to the Nordics and another cataclysm.