I managed to complete my second homebrew cult for Turnip28.
This time based on the Band of the Wurm cult.
Starting with the lore.
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The Brinecursed Host

The Toff of Fine Luster

Johann Salmon was, by any reasonable measure, a Toff of exquisite refinement and catastrophic priorities. Where other commanders of the Turnip fields obsessed over land, lineage, or the proper angle at which one ought to sneer at peasants, Johann cared for one thing only: shiny norberts.

Not the dull, honest kind that passed through muddy hands in market towns, but the good ones, unscuffed, mirror-bright, gleaming like tiny captured suns. He kept them polished in velvet-lined boxes, counted them nightly, and dreamed of them stacked high enough to climb.

His wife, Ella, or Salmon, Ella, as she was strictly indexed in the regiment’s dusty account ledgers, indulged him with patient affection. She managed the household accounts, smiled at his monologues about luster and weight, and only occasionally suggested that perhaps the regiment’s starvation might take precedence over yet another speculative expedition for rumored treasure.

It was Ella, however, who listened most closely when Johann burst into their quarters one night, eyes alight with madness.

“A hoard,” he whispered. “An old one. Hidden in a cavern near the Onion Marsh. Shiny norberts, Ella. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

The regiment marched at dawn.

The Hag of the Onion Marsh

The cave yawned from a low hill like a rotten mouth, its stone lips slick with moisture and fungus. Inside, the air was cold and heavy, and the sound of dripping water echoed endlessly. Deeper within, stacked in careless piles that caught the torchlight, lay the norberts, perfect, radiant, unbearable in their beauty.

What Johann had not mentioned, what the rumor had neglected, was the hag.

She unfolded herself from the shadows. Hunched, root-thin, her eyes reflecting gold and fire. She croaked that the hoard was hers, and that it had been paid for in ways men could not imagine. Johann barely heard her. His gaze was fixed entirely on the shine.

The fight was savage and claustrophobic. Muskets boomed, the sound tearing at the cave walls. Bayonets scraped stone. The hag shrieked curses and clawed flesh until, at last, she fell among her coins, laughing wetly as blood pooled between the norberts.

As she died, she spoke the curse.

Johann felt his skin prickle and tighten. His breath caught painfully. Around him, men screamed as bones bent and fused, fingers webbed, and mouths stretched and puckered into vacant, gape-toothed grins. Scales burst through wool uniforms. Eyes bulged outward, reflecting torchlight like the cold gaze of deep-water things.

Ella clutched Johann’s arm, only for her fingers to melt into eight thrashing, suction-covered tendrils as her dress collapsed around a boneless, bulbous frame. Her voice dissolved into a series of wet, furious bubbles. By the time the echoes faded, no man remained a man.

They were fish, upright, breathing, thinking fish, standing amid dropped muskets and scattered coins, their uniforms split and sagging around alien, slippery forms. The cave smelled of blood, damp stone, and cold brine.

Still Shiny

The hoard lay untouched.

Johann Salmon, slick and silver-scaled, stepped forward and lifted a single norbert from the pile. It gleamed just as beautifully as ever, its surface unmarred by curse or violence. His webbed fingers trembled as he turned it in the torchlight.

Ella watched him, her huge, lidless eyes wide and mournful, yet still sharp with recognition.

“Well?” she croaked, a bubble of bile escaping her mouth.

Johann smiled, a wide, terrible, row-toothed fish-smile.

“Still shiny,” he said.

The Economy of the Host

The regiment never left the cave. They became its guardians, its prisoners, and its legends. Sentient fish-things hoarding norberts they could no longer spend, polishing coins with wet fins in the dark. Johann counted them endlessly, convinced that if he gathered enough shine, some god, hag, or rotting turnip saint would surely notice and lift the spell.

However, a regiment of giant, amphibious fish-men cannot fight a war on obsession alone.

While Johann refuses to let a single mirror-bright norbert leave his cavern, the hag’s hoard contained thousands of dull coins. Scuffed, oxidized, and hopelessly matte norberts. To Johann, these ugly coins are an insult to the hoard, fit only to be thrown out.

To the desperate, mud-covered human mercenaries of Cist, however, a norbert is a norbert.

Now, when the Scale-Bound march to war, their frontlines are a surreal mix: true, horrifying fish-monstrosities marching side-by-side with miserable human sell-swords crammed into claustrophobic, fish-shaped iron armour, all fighting for the leftover, non-shiny scraps of Johann’s infinite hoard.