The Bandit of Porcelain Heads

In Blackwater, the superfluity of helms in every style and shape, coming from a thousand subcultures and descending from a thousand petty wars, has never hid one central trut; the best helms are always Deoth made.
Made to order, for the Deoth have strange, squat skulls, and their helms will not fit comfortably on another’s head, and the Deoth smiths would rather cut off a thumb than mass-produce anything.
The greatest smiths live in the Mountains of Reality, those wealthy and pretentious enough to afford their work (assuming a cash price is allowed) largely live in the Grey Cities, hundreds of dangerous miles away.

The Deoth smiths will not shape metal for a skull they do not know.

Which is how the merchant house of Ragpicker and Sons devised their brief but cunning trade-in Precise Porcelain Heads.

In the Grey Cities, they would offer to cast the head of some notable (requiring several hours this would already be a regrettable expenditure of time for powerful individuals), produce a precise porcelain head, exact to every dimension, and being ceramic, neither shrinking not expanding in heat or cold.
They would then transport the heads to one of the great Deoth smiths, several hundred dangerous miles away, create the helm, and return it, a perfect fit of custom work (only affordable to those who would likely never see a battle, but that is hardly the point).
So it came about the Blackriver Bandit, Anavana Nine-Eyes, (named so as she had cut nine eyes from eight men), executed her most dangerous raid; the purloinment of Ragpicker and Son's cargo of porcelain heads.
One head could perhaps have been ignored or replaced, but Nine-Eyes made off with a riverboat with over a hundred porcelain heads! This represented thousands of work-hours with some of the most powerful people in Blackwater.
A terrible game began with ruthless agents of Ragpicker & Sons tracing and tracking the gang of Anavana Nine-Eyes through the wandering swamp-rivers of the southern Blackriver Plain. Here they would gain ground, there lose it, here set an ambush, there falling into one, here betray and later be betrayed.
The battles and deceptions dragged on for over a year until both sides faced each other down in a multiply-triple crossed standoff-ambush somewhere in the swamps.
No news ever emerged, yet to this day strange, and very exact porcelain heads are said to be found within the swamps, as tribal fetishes, curios and sometimes as objects of investigation when, for whatever bizarre and occult reason, someone needs to know the exact size and shape of a long-dead individuals head. www.eldritch-foundry.com