Ragehook Cleaver

Aura Moderate evocation and transmutation; CL 10th
Slot —; Price 32,400 gp; Weight 14 lbs.

DESCRIPTION

This immense two-handed axe appears to have been forged from layered black iron and dark red steel folded together in violent, uneven waves. The edge is jagged rather than clean, not through poor craftsmanship, but because the weapon seems to have been shaped by repeated impacts against stone, armor, and bone alike. Primitive runes spiral around the haft beneath strips of cracked leather, and the weapon constantly radiates faint warmth, as though it remembers battle even while at rest.

The Ragehook Cleaver functions as a +2 greataxe. While wielded by a raging creature, the weapon’s enhancement bonus increases to +3, and the wielder gains a +2 morale bonus on bull rush and overrun attempts.

Whenever the wielder successfully reduces a living creature to 0 or fewer hit points while raging, the weapon enters a state known as bloodfury for 3 rounds. During this time, the wielder gains a +10-foot enhancement bonus to movement speed, and the weapon deals an additional 1d6 points of fire damage on successful melee attacks. This effect may refresh its duration if another foe is slain, but it cannot stack with itself.

In addition, once per day while raging, the wielder may drive the axe into the ground as a full-round action, releasing a violent shockwave in a 20-foot radius. Creatures within the area must succeed on a DC 18 Reflex save or fall prone and take 4d6 points of sonic damage. Creatures that succeed on the save take half damage and remain standing. The save DC is Constitution-based.

The Ragehook Cleaver is especially favored among barbarian warbands that value momentum above strategy. The weapon rewards aggression, movement, and uninterrupted violence, becoming more dangerous the longer battle continues.

LORE

Among the northern raider tribes of the Frostscar Highlands, there exists an old belief that battle itself is a living thing - a beast with breath, hunger, and memory. Most civilized scholars dismiss this as primitive superstition. Yet those who have witnessed a true barbarian war charge know there is something disturbingly real hidden beneath the poetry. Violence spreads through a battlefield like fire through dry grass, and certain weapons seem capable of carrying that momentum long after their original wielders have fallen.

The first Ragehook Cleaver was said to have belonged to a chieftain named Vargan Twice-Born, a warrior infamous for surviving wounds that should have split his body in half. During the Siege of Black Hollow, witnesses claimed Vargan became faster and more savage with every opponent he struck down, until defenders swore they could hear the sound of a second heartbeat echoing beneath the thunder of combat. When he finally died, his weapon remained too hot to touch for three days.

Modern smiths who attempt to recreate these weapons often perform brutal forging rituals involving battlefield ash, broken shields, and heated iron quenched in animal blood. While most such traditions are likely ceremonial nonsense, adventurers familiar with the Ragehook Cleaver note that these weapons possess an unsettling responsiveness in combat. They do not merely aid aggression - they seem to encourage it.

Veteran barbarians speak quietly of the danger hidden within the weapon’s exhilaration. The Cleaver creates a terrible emotional rhythm during battle. Each victory feeds movement. Each movement feeds confidence. Each strike feeds the illusion that momentum itself can never end. More than one warrior has pursued fleeing enemies far beyond reason, driven onward not by tactics, but by the intoxicating certainty that stopping would somehow break the spell holding them together.

CONSTRUCTION

Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, bull’s strength, haste, shout; Cost 16,200 gp + 1,296 XP

Kelwyn’s Notes

There are weapons crafted for war, and then there are weapons crafted for emotional surrender. The distinction is subtle at first glance, though no less catastrophic for being so. The Ragehook Cleaver does not merely assist violence. It transforms violence into momentum, and momentum into identity. One does not simply swing this weapon. One begins moving with it, emotionally as much as physically, until restraint itself starts to feel unnatural.

What unsettles me most is not the brutality of the thing, but the euphoria. Civilization survives through interruption - through moments where men pause long enough to remember consequence, grief, exhaustion, or mercy. This weapon exists specifically to erase those interruptions. Every fallen enemy becomes fuel for further movement, as though slaughter were not an act but a current capable of carrying the wielder beyond fear, reflection, and eventually humanity itself.

And yet, I confess there is a dreadful magnificence to such artifacts. In battle, one can imagine the wielder appearing less like a soldier and more like some ancient avalanche given flesh - impossible to reason with, impossible to slow, terrible in both power and certainty. The sound of boots striking earth faster and faster amidst smoke and screaming must create the illusion that the world itself has begun accelerating around them.

I once heard a veteran describe surviving a barbarian charge empowered by one of these axes. He did not speak of the wounds afterward. He spoke instead of the sound - that relentless rhythm of footfalls growing nearer through rain and mud while men around him slowly forgot they were defending a wall and instead became animals attempting to flee a forest fire. That, I think, is the true enchantment of the Ragehook Cleaver. Not strength. Not fire. Not destruction. It is the transformation of fear into inevitability.