The Norägthaz, or the Dwarven Danger Rune as it is commonly known, is a symbol of caution which implies an uncontained threat. This is visually communicated by the three lines creating a "barrier" with a fourth and final boundary "missing". Contrary to its name, it is not in fact a rune and is neither part of nor composed from the Dwarven Runic Alphabet. Instead it was a symbol consciously created by Dwarven and Gnomish engineers to represent areas of danger that represented harm to users without mitigation of some kind. The image was also created such that it would be easily convertible to a complementary symbol (known as an Okrägthaz) that would represent that a threat had been contained by adding a fourth line crossing the lower left.
The symbol was popularized by Dwarven rangers surveying the Wastelands after the
Seventh Thalassan Crusade , where it was used to mark areas poisoned, cursed, or otherwise made dangerous or treacherous by the aftereffects of magical WMD. Even now, almost 1200 years later, these areas are mostly still harmful or deadly to passers-by. Over time, the symbol has spread beyond
Mountainhome society and is widely used to denote a dangerous or treacherous area. One might find the symbol etched at the mouth of a cave inhabited by a Dire Bear, painted in an ancient ruin where raiders were unable to disarm traps, or carved on the posts of an unstable rope bridge.
After the Dwarves joined the Empire, the Okrägthaz became the symbol of the
Royal Mages' Guild, the Dwarves' answer to the Empire's
Magocracy . More recently, the Norägthaz has also been co-opted by the Gnomish-led insurrectionist
Xethic Faction .
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