Ordor of the Purple Wurm

Quasi-religious bandit gang entrenched in the northern Crushed Mountains. In addition to robbing travelers and trade caravans, the Wurms - who in addition to loving Purple Worms, also love to misspell common words - harvest and sell the expensive poison that comes from the creatures. The Ordor of the Purple Wurm are the primary source of this poison for the Steel Reciters and others.  Purple Worms, rare and massively destructive subterranean monsters of probable wizard-experiment origin that happen to be the source of the most deadly - and expensive - assassin poison of choice.
At lower levels of the organization, these thugs are indistinguishable from Skinks, Past Lifers, Yellow Fingers, Crows or Glass Street Shankers, but at higher echelons they have high-skill professionals including alchemists specializing in the distillation of poisons; worm-trackers, worm-egg-wranglers, and worm-slayers.
The head of the organization is a Warlock who draws her power from the worms in some mystic communion with their arcane essence.
Fond of the color purple in their clothing and armor, the beast is an everpresent mascot, and tattoos of the creatures are prominent on their arms, chests, backs, necks and legs.
In practice they are an unpleasant mix of big game hunter fanatics with larger-than-life egos and personalities, and dissolute rapists, kidnappers and bottom-tier thugs. The higher-ups often set up contests among their thugs to incentivize murders and kidnappings on the many roads and byways in the Crushed Mountains of the Volsin northern marches. For instance, they may receive as much as five gold pieces per scalp, or twenty gold for a healthy infant or child, more or less at the whim of the middle tier leadership and their wild-living worm hunters, most of which are mid and high-level Gloom Stalker rangers.

Structure

The leader of the group, or at least its shadowy charismatic figurehead, calls herself the Worlock of the Purple Wurm - and evidently is a Warlock who derives her power from some mystical power source associated with the actual Purple Worms or some fiendish creature who has taken them into its portfolio.

Public Agenda

As a religious order they're not very good at spreading their word, but they do a lot better as a cartel producing and distributing dangerous and mostly illegal substances. They will try to recruit any small time competitors or purple worm hunters who seem more interested in the worms than in competing in the poison trade, but will ruthlessly exterminate any serious threats to their monopoly on this trade in the northern states of the Empire. They have slightly less influence in Venen and Arac, south of the province of  Khazig, and other poisons are produced in the Jungles of the Caetica so less demand exists on the Southern Continent,  but their trade routes are extensive through the White Chest teamsters who can move poison and money to almost anywhere on the globe. The widespread nature of the Steel Reciters has in turn spread the availability of their product.

Assets

The gang is thought to number over a thousand individuals, but the vast majority are low-level thugs and bag men, with fewer than a hundred specialists and perhaps fewer than two dozen real leaders, the worm-hunters and egg farmers among them. The distillation process is difficult and time consuming, as well as more than a little dangerous as an average teaspoon dose of the poison is enough to kill ten people. In addition to the thugs, chemical workers, overseers, and hunters there are also the worms themselves, grown to a size well beyond what one might consider manageable before being killed for their poison, numbering at least ten and perhaps as many as 40 at one time, and twice as many eggs, with an average of one in six hatchlings making it to full gown wormhood.

Type

Illicit, Cartel