Wulgruf Banginhorst

A thick apron and stout gloves are
Wulgruf's best friends.  After the
Cockatrices, that is.

Wulgruf is a dwarf from the old and proud Banginhorst clan, hailing from the Five Kings Mountains.  A tall, stout dwarf with a luxurious beard and smile lines like deep canyons, Wulgruf lives in an isolated grove outside of the Isgeri capital of Elidir.  He makes his home in a giant petrified tree, long ago fallen and turned to stone in a titanic battle between the Cockatrice God and an elder druid.  An alchemist by trade, Wulgruf has filled his hollow log with shelves and benches covered in arcane ingredients and technologies used in the distillation of various potions and elixirs.  .  His life-long ambition is a realization of the Kimiya-yi sa'ādat or the Alchemy of Happiness.  Now semi-retired from adventuring, Wulgruf spends his time chronicling his travels and inventions in a collection of giant tomes of home-made parchment, brewing heirloom ales or tinkering with his antique velocipede or safety cycle.

     Wulgruf was raised by a diamond miner, though his father was tragically consumed by a bulette while he was still a youth.  Wulgruf travelled the Five Kings Mountains,  gathering obscure ice mushrooms and various kinds of magical moss.  He composed his magnum opus on the uses of cold weather plants in alchemical potions, and is now widely considered one of the world's foremost experts on the subject.  He soon left the dwarven capital of Highhelm to travel the world, documenting rare ingredients.  Wulgruf is most famous for his piece "The 7 Distillates of Cockatrice Blood and Their Uses" which required years of work with the dangerous and ill-tempered beasts that are its subject.  With several fingers partially petrified, Wulgruf is far from unscathed from his research, but he has developed quite a knack for cockatrice handling and now keeps several as pets.

This is one of Wulgruf's pets.  His name is Chuck.

     When not at home, Wulgruf spends his time expanding his library by combing through the back alley book shops of Elidir and Almas, before stopping in to the dark taverns and public houses to pick up new secrets of the trade and new methods of transmutation. He has sponsored several expeditions to Numeria to recover arcane technologies and ingredients, and will often purchase relics recovered from the wrecked magical vehicles of that land.  Wulgruf smokes an elaborate narcotic of his own concoction, blending the soporific leaves of Kyonin with the fluids that leak from Numerian ruins.  He is also a connoisseur of dwarven ale, and keeps a large number of kegs in his hollow tree, for what he calls his "thinking times."

He lives in a hollow log, but it is a BIG hollow log.

An antique velocipede, rescued from the Bin Men.
It is the only way to travel when pursuing protoscience