I might be being affected by various materials I've read, admittedly. The Lizardman quest has the parasite wormies, the Krork Quest has various indications of the WAAAGH!! field literally warping people and the orks themselves in various manners both in behavior and strengths, there's the Orcslayer indicators of a powerful enough entity bending greenskin wills albeit with the briefest moments of angry showing through but with strong showings of long-lasting control without interference with the Sleeper itself, there are images and mentions of the Chaos Gods occasionally managing to wrest some greenskins towards them even if they never last particularly long, plus things with genestealers and their own manipulations on occasion working like in that Ciaphas Cain book even if that one got interrupted, and so on.
Either way, point is this, the Ix got ahold of a few orcs and goblins, and held them long enough that the spores got them. Long and short of it.
That's it. No more burials in the Middle Mountains! If your corpse aint fit to be fertiliser and/or traded to the Dryads, off to the fire with you.
Between unsanctioned mages spamming raise zombie horde with their waggly dirty hands and primeval shrooms wanting your warm decomposing flesh as a slimy love motel.
No stop put it in Middle Mountain Law, that without proper aftercare- nothing ever dies up here.
Oh man, and here I was all worried! /s. Excellent chappy, if the fungus horde is strong enough to subsume everyone else and is launching a play right now, this raises the question of this being the best time to claim more of the mountains. The fungus should have cleared out all other serious contenders so if we can swoop in after some purging? Maybe we need to transition our alcohol business into flamethrower business!
There is NOT a 3rd Chaos Gate of world-rending proportions that has only ever been held back by the tireless endless infinite work of Grimnir of the Ancestor Gods in the Middle Mountains!
@torroar this is very much like what I would imagine what GW would do if way back in 2002 they decided to come up with a fast zombie faction/subfaction to take advantage of 28 Days Later, and I mean that in the best possible way, well in keeping with the canon factions.
As kinda mentioned long ago, but then fallen to the wayside because things like car accidents and mental stress and various IRL things, the following addition has been made to Spikes, Horns, and Stone 3 so that any rereads or new reads will be fully informed as to how damaged the Druchii were by the Cordwood plan.
For a moment, you consider. What you saw when you were soaring in the air, what little of the field you were able to see at least, was darkly illuminating. The Druchii, you are forced to admit in retrospect, quite simply brought more to the field than you. They outnumbered your assembled military might here, and were it not for the Eonir, would have far eclipsed you in magical power as well. But that has changed. Has been changed, by faith, steel, and gunpowder. A tremendous amount of the latter, especially, given the sheer devastation that the artillery has caused, with aid from handgunners and archers as well. A vast amount of dead lay upon the field, many more of them the enemy than of yours. If you have the right of it, and you are mostly sure you do, what was once a force of Druchii and slaves and warbeasts to outnumber you all has been reduced to the point that now it is your side which has the numerical advantage. If only by the slightest margin. But numbers are not everything, something proven by the bodies that lay outside the walls in such numbers, by the sheer fact that it is the Druchii that are not simply on the back foot but outright retreating. Morale now favors you. The numbers now favor you. The momentum now favors you. The Druchii, infamous across the world as the either the first or second greatest slavers and raiders, are pulling away over an ocean of their own bodies.
The most deadly defensive action you have ever participated in is over.
The solution is self evident, make an firestorm so big that the realm of chaos itself tear oppen and spit Vulkan out due the shee pyroclastic anahilation.
Good news, everyone! There is NOT a 3rd Chaos Gate of world-rending proportions that has only ever been held back by the tireless endless infinite work of Grimnir of the Ancestor Gods in the Middle Mountains!
Come to think of it, we never did find out what that mysterious force attacking from underground that wiped out one of Middenheim's armies was. We only assumed it was Skaven, but they're far the only faction dwelling in deep underground places far from civilization.
wait isn't that the guy who either is camping or would be camping in the forest of shadows otl (wonder if him and zachy ever fought since they lived in the same forrest and his fortress was their)
2. Urzen the Unrelenting, a former General of Strigos, possibly Ushoran's top military advisor in fact. He has a strong, steadily growing army deep in the Forest of Shadows. A little insane, given he drills his unthinking undead army every night, but his forces are slowly growing with time. He has also managed to place agents and build up a minor intrigue network of his own to watch for Lahmians and - in an ironic twist - do to them what they regularly did/do to Strigoi. By which I mean revealing said Lahmians to the authorities. Urzen's greatest wish is not to rebuild Strigos, nor to be worshipped as a king or god as many other Strigoi are fond of. He has one goal, one target: raising a large and powerful enough army to lay siege to the Silver Pinnacle itself and then tear Neferata's head off and shit down her throat. In canon, he was still in the process of doing that. However, in DoDA canon Zacharias would not have tolerated his forces growing to a certain point, and I assure you that the players would have noticed General Urzen the Unrelenting the 2nd Generation Strigoi if he'd gotten involved in the Vampire War. So where is he? Well...who knows, eh? But he didn't get the title of Unrelenting for being easily killed, I'll tell you that much.
a completely original and legally distinct enginering project which only shares superficial similarities with the dawi inventions known as irondrakes, that they're called steelwyrms is purely coincidental due to popular culture.
This could have devastated our slow encroachment into the Middle Mountains area, and slain Morai-Wen. Instead, it's "just" a campaign by the Army of the Range to root it out and burn it out, alongside a motherfucking dragon.
This just goes to show that you really can't relax on your defenses even if you have a major and huge campaign coming like an Everchosen or Beast-tide or super-Waaagh or Nehekharan invasion or whatever. There's always something that can surprise you nastily.
What came from the Middle Mountains was all of these things, and yet none of them. The forms of orcs were unmistakable, as were what were likely beastmen, and skaven, and humans and mutants too, but all were altered utterly. They did not shout or scream as their kind were meant to, there were no battle cries given. Instead, they were a horrible inflamed pale color, bodies slimy and slick despite their very skins seeming to slough off further with every step. They were not dead, nor undead, for their bodies still bled and their chests still heaved with rancid breaths that discolored the air with every exhale. They were all, all of them, whether on the way to losing all their skins or skinless entirely, the hue of curdling milk. Their revealed musculature beneath the sloughing skin and glistening under translucent jiggling slime, was the same texture even. Like boiling hot wax, flash frozen into position, muscle fibers flexing and bulging in rictus petrification yet somehow functioning. To a one, they were utterly hairless, for even those who still yet retained some measure of their original skin for a time yet were completely hairless. Fingers and toes had devolved even further, the musculature there almost seeming trimmed back, leaving sharpened and shaped phalanges into long and incredibly sharp claws that dug into soil, wood, metal, and flesh with equal strength and ease. Each and every one shared the same eyes, regardless of race, orbs of quivering curdled white that seemed without pupil at all yet seemed to fill all who they gazed upon with unnatural dread.
Is this like one of those primordial prehistoric horrors that lived in the Warhammer World? This doesn't necessarily have to be the same as one of those insectoid things from Orcslayer, just because it's controlling races, but. Admittedly, it's control here seems to be more body-control rather than mind control, so it is indeed different.
If the Army of the Range had been deployed elsewhere, it was quickly realized by all whether military or otherwise, then the whole of the Middle Mountain territories might well have been felled before the lowlands even became aware of a problem.
Fucking Middle Mountains, man. Those things are indeed cursed.
Holy shit, we might have lost a lot.
... I wonder if this was Malagor's main "strike" -- or main distraction or tarpit -- at Ostland? That is, of the various nasty surprises he has aimed at each province or each tactical or strategic target, was this one the main trumpcard or distraction that was gonna hit Ostland before the rest of the Beasttide suckerpunched us?
Or, alternatively, maybe he meant to enslave it entirely, and turn its transformative properties to the works of Chaos.
Spores, declared the Shallyans after a short amount of study, spores rising from the living and the dead afflicted, rising up into the air. Immediately orders were given to set the bodies of the dead creatures aflame whenever possible, while rotations upon the walls were changed to be far more frequent.
Spores. Can those spores remain in the ground? They tunnel a lot, tunnel everywhere. Does that imply that that thing has laid its spores in the ground where it has tunneled through? So that we'll have to track down all the places it directed its horde to, and clean up the underground?
One, however, who had remained by the window since entering quarantine and was apparently a faithful Myrmidian, did not degenerate as the others did. Instead, while his face was soon reduced to a wax-like drooping mass, his mind remained his own, something he credited to the 'light of Myrmidia'. From that, the Shallyans theorized and discussed with the Amber wizards as to the ability of the spores of whatever madness the Middle Mountains had produced to remain viable in the long-term in sunlight. It explained as to why they seemed so focused on tunneling beneath their targets, why they had not simply marshalled vast strength on the open field the entire time, why they appeared and disappeared so slowly. And as to why they often seemed to attack when the clouds were thickest, the sun most distant. Perhaps even, one Shallyan proclaimed, the light of the celestial bodies in general might be so, for the creatures did not seem to adhere to either day or night as times to be more active, save when the moon was waning.
It burns in sunlight and moonlight. Odd. Quasi-undead-like. Or maybe, rather, Vampires took some of the weaknesses as inspiration from that thing; convergent evolution of non-mortal monstrosities, that sort of thing. That is, when Vampires were cursed to be harmed by sunlight, maybe it's related to general sort of "things that are not living, react poorly to sunlight or Hysh" pattern.
"I do," the dragon responded mildly, though the word seemed stretched beyond its limit trying to apply itself to the sheer power in the dragon's voice. "A problem since before my time-,"
Alric's stomach felt like it dropped out of his body.
"The Ixfernicth," the dragon repeated. "It is a creature from long ago. The closest approximation you could understand it as an intelligent fungus. Semi-intelligent, semi-sapient."
"So that is its name," Alric repeated the word under his breath a handful of times. "And it has...simply been waiting, all this time, beneath the Middle Mountains?"
The dragon blinked languidly at him.
"Why do you think the dwarfs left the depths of this place so thoroughly? The first thing the fungus does is remove the skin and hair from the face - including beards."
"You wouldn't, you won't, it doesn't matter. What does matter is this - the Ixfernicth will keep coming until it has exhausted its surplus of bodies, then return to relative dormancy in its caverns. Unless it gets stirred up again by whatever idiot thought to try and direct it."
Some idiot thought to try and direct it. Aha. I wonder if it was Malagor?
... Or, alternatively, maybe it was Skaven? Maybe one of them stumbled onto its lair and tried to enslave it. And then, oops, it spread into parts of the Underempire's passageways.
I mean, after all, the horde did include even Skaven amongst it. Orcs, Beastmen, men, mutants, and Skaven.
Edict of the middle mountains:
Aside from regular patrols and fungal trimming maintenance, the middle mountain's caves and hidden places are off limits unless you want to trigger the mucus fungus apocalypse and Draconic reprisal.
The ruins of an encampment, one accommodating far fewer than the more than twenty thousand sent into the mountains, was found burnt and razed. Seemingly from within. There were no bodies, only streaks of soot and shattered portions of armor and metal, rotten and sodden leather. In the end, the only thing that could be found was something hacked into the rock of a nearby boulder near the center of the camp, frantically carved by a nearby broken sword and spattered with long-dried blood. It was a single word, or perhaps just part of one: 'Under'.
Very likely it looks like.
I was thinking it was going to be Dieter Helsnicht taking them out with Undead. Like the guy carving the message died mid counter-clockwise circle for the letter a and they ended up mistaking it for an r.
Well, Dieter could be that idiot other than Malagor.
He might be worried and doing some dumb stuff given the empire is united now and it seems all the other big-name necromancers in the empire are dead.
We also need to invent NBC suits for ogres. Also ogre scale flamethrowers. Start sanitizing the depths of the middle mountains.
Or, alternatively, these spores seem to die in sunlight. There is the brand new college of Hysh. I bet we could commission some glowing orbs of sunlight to help purge this infection.
... I am now picturing Ogre versions of the Dwarf's Irondrakes. Gromril-armored badasses with flame-spewing irondrakes. Except rather than Dwarfs, they are Ogres.
Hmm. So, we also have to ask the question, was the Middenland army wiped out by the Ix? As people have pointed out, no mention was made of shamblers in Middenland livery. But that only means they didn't attack us. There is still the possibility that a different branch of the Ix closer to Middenland has the entire remains of their army laying in wait.
Or we were right the first time and they got wiped out by the Beastmen. The Ix don't strike me as intelligent enough to hold back on its efforts to grow and expand out for a strategy.
Actually I wonder -- is it possible that Gunthar's Middenland army that got wiped out...
Got wiped out in the process of interfering with the Beastmen trying to capture and corral this Ix thing?
They all got wiped out to a man. But maybe they interfered with the Beastmen's efforts enough such that they failed to enslave the Ix.
If so, we might owe Gunthar's men a solid for this. His men's sacrifices might have helped Ostland and all of the Empire. And most people might never know it.
It might be something worth looking into. That is, the possibility that the Middenland army was responsible for foiling this plot of Malagor's. Might be something we can use to lead to a reduction in tensions between our respective leaders.
So the key, then, would be to not gloat or hold this over Gunthar's face and go all "Oh hey I found what killed your men. And then killed it in turn." No matter how tempting it might feel for that.
I mean, in the end, this was a primordial horror that threatened the world of man, and many people died to blunt its threat and/or destroy it for good. And that many men, an entire army, died without the outside world even realizing that there was such a threat.
simple answer we go
Listen gunthar we don't like you, you don't like me but your men dead preventing the beastmen from gaining control over something very dangerous which then killed your men and we killed that thing we are even and we don't ever have to talk about this again goodbye
.. I wonder if this was Malagor's main "strike" -- or main distraction or tarpit -- at Ostland? That is, of the various nasty surprises he has aimed at each province or each tactical or strategic target, was this one the main trumpcard or distraction that was gonna hit Ostland before the rest of the Beasttide suckerpunched us?
It's not. Chances are he was vaguely aware of the Arks due to auguries, so this would've been the second swipe to throw our forces off balance before going all in on Wulfenberg 0proper
He might have other cards to play, rather he definitely does, but this is gonna force him to reorganize things now
Edit: The Army of the Forest being untouched throughout all this represents a very serious obstacle should our Lord tier units make it back from Sakalken relatively intact
