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Satynath Wyldhunt Gallery and Lore
🕑 Added 2021-12-02 16:01:59 +0000 UTCEvery month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The December Battle Pack is the Satynath Wyldhunt, savage beast-warriors in the thrall of a sinister dark goddess of the hunt!
Become a Patron now and gain access to the Satynath Wyldhunt here!
Enjoy this gallery of the Satynath Wyldhunt miniatures and a glimpse into the story behind the faction!
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"Nyä! Nyä! Shogg-Nergal! The great beast of the wood with a thousand maws!"
-Prayer to the Black Goat
Lurking in the wilderness of the world's darkest lands, the savage children of the forest prepare for their bloody ritual hunts. Born of ancient magic gone foul and wrong, they blend the primal savagery of beasts with a capacity for hatred, cruelty, and fanaticism that is the hallmark of the truly sapient races. When the howls of a thousand beasts fill the air, it means the Satynath Wyldhunt has scented prey, and the hunt has begun...
The beastfolk of the Wyldhunt, called wyldyr by the eldarch, have what can only loosely be called a society. They live in countless bands of semi-nomadic blood-hungry beasts that prowl chosen territory in the darkest of woodlands, far from more civilized and settled realms. These tribal bands are unified only by common purpose, that of hunting other sapient, thinking mortal beings and offering them up in bloody sacrifice. These tribes are as likely to war upon each other, enslaving those who survive or driving them to become prey in their ritual hunts. But it is those of other foreign races that are truly prized as victims, and any unwise enough to trespass in the lands of the Wyldhunt will soon find themselves made a target.
The hunting hounds of the Wyldhunt are of the mature Bakkhos breed, wyldyr also called Wyldhunters. Having proven themselves by feeding the tribe with beast prey, they are permitted to engage in the ritual hunts against the true enemies of their kind. Large and powerful with great greasy manes of fur and proud curling horn racks, Wyldhunters thunder through the forest floor on their powerful pounding hooves. Wyldhunters can move at a quick loping pace for hours without tiring, before running down their prey in a final great burst of speed.
Wyldhunters carry all manner of hunting tools, their weapons cunningly crafted to give the cruel wyldyr the option of either killing their enemies outright or skillfully crippling them so the joy of the hunt may be prolonged. The best prey is the kind that fights back, letting the Wyldhunters experience the thrill of fighting for survival, before finally bringing the prey down and honoring them with a swift death. Those prey who only flee in fear or provide lesser entertainment are often kept alive, to amuse the Wyldhunters in other wicked ways.
The ritual hunts that the wyldyr perpetrate against other races are done to honor the foul deity of the Wyldhunt, a being worshiped by all the wyldyr tribes known as the Black Goat. Seeing her as the creator and sustainer of the wyldyr race, the Wyldhunt honors this deity as a dark goddess of fertility and the hunt, whose symbol is the head of a many-horned goat-like beast, often represented by the skulls of forest beasts, and even the skulls of fallen wyldyr. Wyldhunters often carry totems and banners made of flayed hide and flensed bones, dedicating their kills to their monstrous deity. This is the Satynath, the 'great hunt that honors the goddess with blood', the one and only chosen purpose of the Wyldhunt.
The wilderness regions that the Wyldhunt have claimed as their territory are hostile realms, where the land has been swallowed in wild-growth, thick roots choking the ground and tall trees reaching up to blot out the sky. These wild places resist the bite of woodsman axes, the plows of farmers, and any effort to settle or develop. These are the lands the Wyldhunt values, where they can feed off the raw flesh of fierce beasts, build their tools from the bounty of wood, stone, bone, and hide, and spill the blood of their prey onto roots and crude idols. This is the only true way for the wyldyr to live, for the Black Goat loathes the softness of civilization and only in the wild places can her children hear her call and honor her in their hunts.
The goddess worshipped by the wyldyr is known by many ominous titles - Mistress of the Hunt, the Great Beast, the Mother of Monsters, the Black Goat, and more. Rendered in the brutish, growling speech of the wyldyr themselves, this deity is called Shogg-Nergal. The wyldyr have little concept of a family unit, with tribes raising their offspring collectively until they have grown strong enough to distinguish themselves as worthy of naming and notice, and tribe-mates are siblings to one-another. But all worship and honor Shogg-Nergal as mother of the race, and claim to have been born when she scattered her blood upon the forest in ages long past, causing the wyldyr to sprout up fully grown and hungry to hunt and kill. They are her flesh, her claws and hooves and horns, her vicious fangs and her ever-hungry devouring maws.
The wyldyr tell gruesome legends of their goddess, that she birthed herself out of the shadow of the night or from the split bloody belly of a great serpent, that her siblings are the crow and the rat and the wolf, that she chased prey into the sky to become constellations and that she comes down from the darkness between the stars to prowl the deep woods to feed on the weak and unfaithful. These stories are recited in song and ritual in the aftermath of greatly successful hunts, with tales sung by savage forest-shaman and accompanied with music played on instruments of carved bone.
The Nergali Bonesingers play pipes made from the bones of victims of past hunts, and can invoke dark magicks with their piping music, fueling the fervor of their tribe-mates during their profane rituals. The younger, unproven Wyldlings participate in mock hunts and displays of strength to honor their hunter elder-siblings and the Black Goat, lashing at one-another with horn, claw, tooth, and crude weapons in frenzies of worship.
At the heart of every tribe's territory are great, monolithic idols of stone, strung with gruesome trophies of their hunts and embellished with crude carvings, with signs of power and images of the goddess. These stones are the sites of the foul rituals of the Wyldhunt, where living sacrifices are made and the next generation of the tribe are conceived in perverse fertility rituals, under the stone gaze of the Black Goat. The largest and most well-guarded of these idols, hidden away in the most remote lands, are not mere common stone, but glow with an unholy radiance. They bleed a ruinous, poisoned magic that twists the land and trees in unnatural ways, and fills the wyldyr with dark strength. Wyldhunt legends say these great stones fell out of the night in an ancient age, the gnawed bones of dead gods slain by the Black Goat and bestowed upon her children as trophies to encourage them to greater efforts.
In recent times, efforts by the Bloodborn Eldarch to claim one of these stones for their own designs have only driven the tribes of the Wyldhunt to the heights of utmost fury, and many tribes have begun to set aside their traditional grudges and gather in never-before-seen numbers, united under ambitious and fanatical hunt-leaders that plan to strike back at the soft races of the civilized lands, in vengeance for their desecration of the Black Goat's sacred trophies.
Hooves shake the forest. Howls ring in the night air. The Satynath Wyldhunt has chosen their prey. Blood will flow. For the Black Goat, the great beast of the wood with a thousand maws.
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Comments
Battle Yak
A discord warrior had the really cool idea that wyldyr females actually become stronger when pregnant because of the whole fertility goddess angle, so yeah... not going to happen tomorrow or anything but now I do really want to make bad-ass pregnant wyldyr ladies.
JK
Worshippers of the Black Goat, a dark fertility goddess... am I the only one that thinks the Bonesinger could do with a couple of pregnant variants?
Battle Yak
Thanks, I really enjoy making them.
Dusk
Really love the work you're putting into lore as much as the models, it gives a lot of character to your releases !
