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Grolkaur Khanate Gallery and Lore
🕑 Added 2023-07-02 15:01:02 +0000 UTCEvery month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The July Battle Pack is the Grolkaur Khanate, merciless centaur barbarians that reign over their desolate wasteland realm!
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Enjoy this gallery of Grolkaur Khanate miniatures and a glimpse into the lore behind the faction!
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I commune this message in haste, for the situation is dire. The expedition has failed. The beast-aberrants struck our caravan as we sought to cross the barren path to the inner deserts, following the path shown by the scrying-beacon. We had brought a small army, thought sufficient to face any foe, but we were outmatched. They could not be stopped. They trampled our troops like dry grass. They wielded the art! Crude, unfocused, like a child, but a child with the might of a gygas. I can still feel the power of their spellcrafter, battering at my mind, scouring away my defenses, like wind erroding stone...
The few survivors fled, cloaked in spells of concealment. We've regrouped at the previous site. We have enough supplies left to attempt escape. I can only entreat fate that we can reach the leygate. If we cannot, then the Order must know. The scryings are correct. It's here, beneath the earth. And it has already begun to awaken...
Something is wrong. The soldiers are alarmed... they've followed us! Followed my... my communion! King in Carmine, they can hear my magic!
-Magic-sent report of Vydin Bene'thromar, Magus of the Order Encarmine
The thundering of hooves shakes the ground underfoot. Billowing clouds of dust are the herald of their charge. Blood-curdling howls fill the air. The warriors of the Grolkaur Khanate have sighted new victims. And it is far too late to flee.
The grolkaur dwell in Rakai, one of the most inhospitable realms of the eastern lands. A realm of sprawling badlands, of blistering ruin. A realm of beasts, and monsters. An eternity ago, a grand civilization once flourished there, towering spires and citadels raised by magic piercing the horizon. But the ancients fell to ruin, and the magic they wielded became a poison that sank deep into the land, making it harsh and cruel. From this scarred land the grolkaur were born, creatures both beast and man, and they have risen to rule over their domain by being harsher and crueler still.
The grolkaur are an unsettling sight to behold, an unnatural blend of many different living forms. Anthropoid upper-torsos sit atop equine-like bodies, the trunk of the form fused with the neck of the latter. Jagged hooves punch into barren earth as they race across the wasteland plains of Rakai, their scarred humanoid limbs grasping crude but sturdy weapons. Lumpy, snarling features are often deformed with sprouting curls of bone spikes and horns. Like many creatures that dwell in the dusty wastes of Rakai, the grolkaur exude a wrongness, a sense of living beings that should not be, owing to the tainted magic that is responsible for their existence.
Grolkaur Marauders are fearsome opponents indeed, their equine bodies granting them speed and endurance to run down most any foe. Even mounted enemies can rarely outpace a marauder once their bloodlust has been ignited. While their unnatural forms may lack agility and precise movement, they more than make up for it with the bone-shattering strength of their charge, crashing through enemy ranks and running down the scattered foe. A line of grolkaur marauders thundering across the dusty plains can unnerve even the most determined opponents.
The grolkaur themselves are far from the only form of life that has sprung up from the hostile land. True predators, vicious beyond imagining, have spawned in the remote wastelands through unknown providence, and one of the most dangerous is the Wastestalker Croticore. Blending attributes of desert felid, scorpion, and quillhog, Croticore are radically effective killing machines, their array of natural weapons enabling them to evisercate, perforate, and contaminate their prey. It is a testament to the brutality of the grolkaur that they are able to subdue and tame such savage creatures for use as warbeasts. Even then, the grolkaur do not risk allowing the creatures to reach their full mature size. Truly monumental specimens dwell in the deeper deserts, far too ferocious and intelligent to submit to any master...
Only in the recent age has the pratice of magic been adopted by the grolkaur. Magic has always surrounded them, saturating their lands and its creatures - such magic is the very reason for their existence as a blend of many lifeforms. But to truly wield the magic of their land with will and intent was always a skill that eluded them for millennia. But no more. In recent generations, a new breed of grolkaur has emerged, those able to hear the whispering voices on the wind, in the shivering sands, and deep below the growling, grinding earth. Something within the land is awakening, and the Grolkaur Elementalists can hear it's call. And with every season that passes, their powers grow.
Elementalists can speak to the land, to the wind and the sands and the stone. To the magic that coils throughout their realm like a nest of rattlesnakes. The magic is of an ancient sort, connected to life, shaping life. For aeons it has festered and mutated, and now the land itself is coming alive, in all its barbaric glory. The grolkaur call out to the land as it stirs, and the land responds. Fragments of it stir and rise, building bodies for its lifeforce from the rock and sand. Elementals, incarnations of the land, beings of lifeless ruin given life. The largest of these monstrosities are like walking mountains, their thunderous stride shaking the ground and filling the sky with sandstorms. Desolation made manifest, the Ruinstorm Elemental is the embodiment of the desert, scouring all life and erroding any barrier that stands in its way.
Rakai was not always the inhospitable realm it is today. Eons ago, Rakai was a verdant realm, a jewel in the crown of the ancient eldarch civilization that held dominion over all the world of Jerra. Their time of dominion came to an end during the great ruinous era known as the Age of Hunger. Their citadels crumbled into ruin. Twisted, toxic magic poured unfettered into the land, withering it into the wasteland it is today. The creatures that once lived there were slain or changed, and numerous terrible new races were spawned from that time, the ancestors of the grolkaur among them.
For centuries the grolkaur wandered in nomadic tribe-herds, preying on other races that strayed into their territory, but never strong or numerous enough to strike out from their desolate domain and conquer richer lands. This has changed in recent era. A new civilization has risen from the tribes in the wastes, from many banding together into a larger, more organized society. Once thought too fractious to ever ally with one-another, the grolkaur herds are uniting under a single leader - the Great Khan, to whom the others have pledged their blades.
The Great Khan's ambition knows no bounds. His breath is the scouring hot wind of the deep desert, his bones hold the strength of its deep rocky mountains, and his soul dreams the same dream as the land itself. Something is stirring in the land. Far beneath the deserts, the power the eldarch commanded in their golden age lies hidden in buried ruins. And something there has survived, something from that dread era that has slept wounded all this time, but now stirs. It bleeds the tainted power that has spread throughout the land and poured into the souls of the grolkaur. And it's hunger grows...
The grolkaur mystics pry more secrets from the land with every passing season. Knowledge once thought vanished from the world has been rediscovered in this blistered realm of beasts. The former bearers of this knowledge, the eldarch race, have turned their attentions to Rakai, sending expeditions to probe the deep deserts in search of fragments of lost lore that they yearn to reclaim. Thus far, they have encountered only death, death as the claws of the desert beasts, or at the blades of the grolkaur. Through torture of body and soul, the grolkaur have learned even more from the eldarch trespassers, and know that soon a time of conflict that will test them is fast approaching. The eldarch will be coming in force, and others too, seeking to the buried power in Rakai. The grolkaur will be waiting, hooves and blades sharp, the power of the land harnessed to the vision of the Great Khan.
The wastelands will reach out to devour the world, and an empire of ruin will be born. The time of the Grolkaur Khanate is at hand.
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