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Forewarning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Once upon a time . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Chapter 1: Humanity Enslaved . . . . . . . . . .10
Chapter 2: Rebellion against God . . . . . . . .18
Chapter 3: The Hells of Urcaen . . . . . . . . .22
Chapter 4: Birth of the Grymkin . . . . . . . . .24 
Chapter 5: The Old Witch . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Chapter 6: The Wicked Harvest Begins . . . . . .36

Defiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
 The Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48
 The Dreamer & Phantasms . . . . . . . . . . . .50
 The Heretic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52
 The King of Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 
 The Wanderer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56
Zevanna Agha, the Fate Keeper . . . . . . . . .58

Nightmares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Cage Rager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
Gorehound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
Frightmare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Skin & Moans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Crabbit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 
Rattler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75

Grymkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Dread Rots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 
Hollowmen & Lantern Man . . . . . . . . . . . .86
Mad Caps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88
Cask Imps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Murder Crows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Neigh Slayers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
 O NCE
 UPON a 
 TIME ...
O nce upon a time, the Maker of Man—the Hunter of the Wurm,
the gigantic Masked God Menoth—stalked Caen. In the shadow
that his looming shape threw on the still-forming world and after the
passage of his burning footsteps, the first mewling men and women
crawled forth from the foaming waters to seek shelter in lands that
 were new and untamed. Humanity watched as their towering Creator
abandoned them to the hungry and thorny world, chasing after his
ultimate prey. He did not hear as they called out to him and prayed for
guidance. He simply left them behind.
Perhaps Menoth did not want  to hear them because he wished only
to hunt the Great Beast that prowled in the tangled forests and flashed
across the rocky peaks of the new world: the Devourer Wurm. It was
the ever-changing beast that gave the wolf its fangs and the lion its
claws. The Beast of All Shapes and the Creator of Man waged a never-
ending war with one another, both unable to overcome the strength of
their opponent. Consumed by his desire to win this unwinnable war,
Menoth had no time for trifling concerns like humankind.

So the wild folk learned to live without their Maker, hiding in caves
and cutting their own path through the snarled realm in which they
had been left alone. They gathered into families and clans, and those
clans grew into tribes. In time they were spread all across the land— 
living, hunting, and striving together against the unforgiving world.

Humanity was freethinking then and uninhibited. Each and

every one among them was able to hunt and love and die on his or
her own terms. They wandered where they pleased, keeping only
the possessions they truly needed to survive, having no interest in
amassing great piles of useless things.

 T he   Ma k e r s  fo r t ,  � t i  pl a ce   a nd   t a   

h i   pe ar  s e ki  n g t e Be a     ’  f le   h   .
H e l e f  t h i s c hi l d   r en   h un  g  r   y 
, f or   ce   d t � f o ra   ge   a nd   h u n 
B u    e y a r e  t .
  e  
T h ey   ’v    a s  e    b et    e r h un   e  r   s. 
d  e f le  s  h   o  f 
 ei  r p re  y   a s 
h e n ev   r w i   
 These first people lived within the pulse and thrum of the primal
 world. Every day was a new opportunity to explore and experience
Caen. They learned their strength and tested their cunning. All
lived according to their own desires and needs. They told stories
by moonlight, sang songs in the blackest depths of the night. Their
spirits became strong because they had survived, wise because they
had learned from one another, and fierce because the weakness was
purged out of them by the uncompromising world. What they seized
from the world they savored, and their songs rang out beneath the
moons and stars. When they died, their souls left their flesh behind to
be untethered and free. B o ne    � b o n e a 
n d b lo   od    � b lo   
u n  il  t e s 
od   
pi r i   s o ar   s 
 After a time, the glint of these released spirits and the raw vitality
of the wild folk living on Caen drew the eye of the Maker away from his
hunt. When he witnessed what his creations had become, the Masked
God began to crave the pure essence lying hidden deep within their
marrow. Menoth hungered for their souls.

Menoth knew he could not simply reach out and claim them, for all
of humanity had a buried strength that could rattle the oldest oaks and
grind mountains down to powder. If these free people discovered that
power, they might unite against him, or they might reject him in favor
of other gods, such as the distant maiden who danced across the stars.
They might even kindle their own power to become gods of their own
making.

 Already many of these mortals had turned to the worship of

Menoth’s foremost enemy, the Great Beast. He saw this jealously, as
the hunters praised not his name but that of the Devourer Wurm. The
hungry serpent would not hesitate to claim their spirits when they
passed from the world of the living to the land of the dead. Worst of all,
beyond even these worlds a greater darkness greedily waited, and like
ravenous spiders that hide between the walls, the dwellers in this outer
darkness were eager to add human souls to their collection.
 “
 The Masked God
began to crave the
pure essence lying
hidden deep within
their marrow.
Menoth hungered
for their souls.

”
 Chapter 1
Humanity Enslaved

F earing the loss of his creation’s souls, Menoth devised a cunning

plan to convince humankind to willingly become his servants. In
Urcaen, the land of spirits, he built a vast and breathtakingly beautiful
city. All souls who could reach its gates would be welcomed inside to
inhabit its streets and structures and there become an army beyond
any conceived of by mortal minds. It was a city built to expand to
accommodate all who could and would arrive across the vastness of
time. Soon it was sprawling larger than a continent, bordered by high
W e lc o   m   walls of alabaster stone clad in bronze and shining gold.
e  
t � y o ur    , w e lc o   me   
c a g 
  e!   This city would become home to all the souls Menoth could lure
Y o u h av   b u  to him. Some came to him unbidden, drawn to their creator by some
i 
a  y ou   r d a  l t i t 
ys  .  inner need for his cruel neglect, but not enough to sate his appetites— 
not enough to guard the monumental walls and perform the necessary
labors of his city, not enough to serve as soldiers and slaves in the
endless war against his adversary. His greed and gluttony were
boundless, and so he devised four clever gifts to draw his abandoned
children back to him: the Flame, the Wall, the Sheaf, and the Law.
Some would say any true and kind father would have given such gifts
to them without a price or, better, would have simply helped them
discover these gifts on their own.
The Maker devised these gifts so the wild folk would worship him
and abandon their uninhibited and primitive ways. He sought to instill
in them a fear of the land and its beasts, a fear that would stay with
them even beyond their deaths. Then when they died and their souls
passed to Urcaen, all those who claimed the gifts would be trapped
in his city and become his eternal warriors. Their power would be
chained to his purpose forever.
Perhaps the Masked God thought of these gifts as a true blessing.
He himself had never been comfortable in the unsettled places; even
the wind and rain angered him. It may be that when he looked upon
his forgotten children, he wanted to make amends for abandoning
them for so long. But a god looks with a god’s eyes, not a mortal’s, and
the Maker did not see how receiving his gifts could be a poison to their
spirits, how it would chain them to one another and rob them of the
freedom that made them clever and strong.
In time humankind would hold dominion over one another and
 would desire more power still. Each bit of it they claimed would stain their
hearts, until what had been a beating, hot-blooded muscle became a dark
 y   s h a 
   o 
 d w    f w h a    
o 
and charred chunk of coal. Menoth offered his poisoned gifts, and many A d i  n  g a h e ar    s h o u ld  be 
claimed them. His priest-kings were the first to taste the poison, and they
joyfully distributed it to all who could hear their honeyed words.
The first gift Menoth offered to his children was the Flame, and
many said, “Feel! Now the cold wind will not bite when we lie down to
sleep, and the light will drive back the shadows, for in the shadows we
see so many hungry things eager to taste our blood.” And so they took
the gift and built fires to chase away the shadows of their imagination.
They constructed hearths of stacked stones and cut down trees to feed
the flickering flames. They stopped wandering, for who would want
to stray far from the light, warmth, and comfort of the hearth? Those
 who took the Flame soon forgot how to see by star and moonlight,
deepening their fear of the night.
Next, Menoth gave to them the Wall, and they said, “Look! Behind
our walls, we are safe from the wolves in the nighttime and safe from
our neighbors in the day, for who could breach a wall built of such
stout and sturdy stones?” And so those who accepted this gift labored
to build more walls, carving the land into pieces, and they fought to
keep one another outside of the walls they called their own. Any who
crossed these walls they named as trespassers and spies, and they
killed such intruders for refusing to abide by the web of walls that
Menoth trapped them in.
  And then Menoth gave them the Sheaf, and they said, “Taste! Now
our stomachs will no longer ache from hunger when we are clumsy
hunters and our prey eludes us.” And so some of the people plowed
 vast fields and sowed grain, which they ate until they were fat and
lazy, learning to prefer even mealy bread to the flesh of beasts hunted
honestly and freshly killed. Those who toiled in the field became reliant
on those who bore spears to protect them, and so they became servants
to the lord with the most spears. The grain they harvested was taken
from them, and thus were links added to the chain of slavery.
Last, Menoth gave the gift of the Law to his people, and they said,
“Listen! Now we no longer need to wonder if we are good or if we are
evil, if we are wrong or if we are right, because Menoth has given us
the Law. We must only obey!” Some among them learned the Law,
surrendering the need and the right to think for themselves. They
came to see how much better they were than the others, how only
cruel punishment could hope to bring the wicked back to the path of
the righteous. Some cemented their authority over the rest, gaining
the power to decide who would live behind which Walls, who would
be warmed by the Fire, who would feast well on the Sheaf, and who,
by the Law, would be made kings and queens over all others. And
those held in the highest regard were the priests who spoke praises to
Menoth, who took credit for the bounty given them.

The Unchained and Unbowed

Thus civilization was born and soon in turn gave birth to Icthier.
Cinot, founder of this city, was in truth the first and greatest of
Menoth’s lickspittles, a priest who did more than any other to
further spread Menoth’s poison. All in Icthier would bow before him,
surrendering their freedom, their thought, and their very souls.
But not all those who were offered the Gifts were so eager to
hand over their freedom. A few saw through Menoth’s promises; they
knew that what he offered was poison. Decrying his gifts, they said,
“Keep your Flame and your Wall, your Sheaf and your Law! You would
enslave us in this life and in the next. You would steal our freedom and
force us into your city to serve you. Look how it destroys those within
 “
They knew that
 what he offered
 was poison.
”

 women spurned the gifts of their Creator.
The Child chose to be defiant and would not obey. Her soul gleamed
 with the wild power of untamable innocence and the rage of youth.
He r c ry w a n  s   t  t e  o   r  s :
   o  t 
  � s  u  m  m  o  t  e  c  a    o  f  D e  f  i  a  n  c  e .
it! They are senseless and fat, greedy and lazy. The only gift you offer
us is the rot of corruption!” And so these few, brave, free men and
The first to rebel was the Child. Menoth’s laws placed the parents
above their children, and they were expected to devise and enforce
petty rules about what was acceptable and what forbidden, what could
be done and what shouldn’t. The Child hated these laws because they
prevented her from doing what she wanted for no good reason at all.
Her angry screams deafened any who would tell her what to do, so
much that they couldn’t even hear their own thoughts. No wall or
dictate could contain her. Never would she accept the slaver’s chain.
There also came the Wanderer. The walls the people built were
made to keep others from wandering, to keep them out of certain
places. A road served as a different sort of limitation, dictating a set
and finite path chosen by whoever laid its stones. The Wanderer did
not accept such constraints on his freedom. An individual should be
at liberty to walk wherever he pleases, so the Wanderer moved with
no regard for these barriers whether erected by mortal or god. He
discovered he could blaze new and impossible paths that no other
man could fathom, and when he dared follow them he could journey
to places beyond imagining, even into the otherwise intangible stuff
of dreams.
 As Menoth’s laws sapped others of their powers of imagination,
one woman rejected the laws he wrote defining what is and what
isn’t . The Dreamer wanted nothing to do with the reality Menoth had
created, and she refused to accept it. Instead she dreamed up wholly
new realities to reside in, realities so vivid and vibrant that the world
around her began to take on new and fanciful life in its envy of what
she could imagine.
 All but last was a man who rejected not only Menoth’s gifts and the
society that came with them, but all other people and everything in
the world as well. He hated Menoth for his creation, hated humanity
even more, and hated the way Menoth’s laws drew people together
and encouraged them to mind one another’s business. He wanted
nothing more than to be left alone by all, to live as a hermit. His spite
and enmity were so absolute that the very bodies of those who came
too close to him would begin to wither and ache. Animals and plants
 would shrivel and die if they lingered in his presence. His desire for
solitude became itself a force of nature, dividing him from all else. In
time he sat alone on a barren plot of earth as the spiteful despot of his
own empty realm, a self-satisfied King of Nothing.
The defiance shown by these rebellious ones enraged Menoth. It
 was not just their rejection that galled him but also how, in turning
their backs on their Creator so irrevocably, they had discovered the
greater power residing within their own individual souls. If others
also discovered this, the god would be undone. His plan had been so
clever and his gifts devised so cunningly, but these petulant humans
had tossed them aside without a thought. Menoth desired a tool to
drag these disobedient creations back to his worship. Failing that, he
intended to end their lives in a way so terrible that it would serve as a
curse and warning to any others with the temerity to refuse him.
 A g  f  
i  o  f   f  i re   
b ui  
i  f  e re  n     s l   
 And so Menoth kindled the power within the most devout of those  f  a d  f  
o 
ou  r   ce  . 
 who had accepted his gifts and abided by his laws, and these were
elevated as priests and kings among humankind. They struck out
across the world, emerging from their cities to put the torch to all of
the Creator’s children who chose to act against him. The priest-kings
and champions of Menoth led their armies and cleaved through the
savages beyond the Wall. Their names were uplifted as golden pillars
of the civilized. After Cinot arose Golivant, Khardovic, Thrace, Belcor,
and Geth. But there was one who came before even Cinot, one who was
erased and stricken from all records. He was first. He was the highest
and became the lowest. His name is gone, replaced with a word that
transcribes his very essence—Heretic.
The Heretic was a priest-king who blazed like the first light of
dawn, beating back the shadows in Menoth’s name. He carved a bold
path along which were left countless hamlets that would one day grow
into cities, and those cities would in turn grow into kingdoms. His
light cast a long shadow that eclipsed even Cinot, whom he knew and
 “
 We are born of
thine own flesh!
 Whatever ye can
 will, so can we!
”
 instructed. Indeed, much that is credited to Cinot should be cast at
the feet of the Heretic instead. By Menoth himself he was guided in
erecting the grand city of Acrennia, and he soon expanded civilization
to the north and west, spreading the fires of Menoth.
 As his legend grew, however, the Heretic saw the divine for
 what it truly was. Looking at his own self-supremacy and all that
he commanded, he realized all mortals have within them a touch of
divine power. He learned that his might had not been bestowed upon
him by Menoth but rather that the god had simply kindled that which
 was always there within. The Heretic knew himself to be singular
and special, and he began to dream that beneath the mask worn by
Menoth was hidden a face identical to his own. But in this revelation
he also saw the world as flawed and ill-made; Menoth’s gifts were but a
gilded cage meant to distract humanity from the truth that they were
all enslaved in death. If he truly was the inheritor of power to rival
Menoth’s own, the Heretic knew he must reshape the world into a new
O nl  y 
  n e w  form and shatter the chains of bondage.
e  y e s w i 

p i er  c   e s u c h   
d ec   ep   ti o  n   . Most of all, he saw that Menoth was not a just god. Menoth did not
punish the wicked, those who wielded his Gifts like weapons against
their neighbors, nor did he reward those who selflessly cared for others
 with no material benefit to themselves. Instead the god rewarded only
obedience, punished only defiance. The Heretic was the first to have
the scales of deception fall from his eyes, but he would not be the last.
From that point forward the Heretic refused to wield his power in
the god’s name, bending it instead to his own purposes. He would not
remain Menoth’s puppet, knowing himself to be his Creator’s equal—if
not his superior. He harnessed his own divine might and stoked the
spark of godhood within him to a roaring flame.

The Heretic raised his face to the heavens and bellowed at his Creator, “Ye have
cast us in thine own image! We are born of thine own flesh! Whatever ye can
will, so can we!” 
  Chapter 2
Rebellion against God
Once we marc hed against the walls of Icthier 
But Menoth strode to batt le imper vious to our spears.
He burned our flesh and spurned our souls
 And banished us to haunt these stones
So lin ger now our spirits here.
 —  Ancient Menite rhyme of Acr ennia

S pitting in the eye of god, the Heretic’s disobedient and defiant

message spread like wildfire. Others throughout Acrennia were
drawn to him like moths to a flame, and in time the Heretic sparked
the fires of a rebellion. Those who joined him were not merely the
superstitious or cowardly but true individuals who wanted to return to
their lives free of Menoth’s demands and the gifts he thought to offer
humanity.
There were some who took to this rebellion with swords and
spears, following the Heretic’s blazing path as he rolled over many of
the villages he himself had once nurtured. His army marched on the
first city, Icthier, ready to tear down the oppresssive edifice Menoth
had made.
Two of the defiant ones, the Child and the Wanderer, joined
the Heretic as he prepared to destroy Menoth’s bastion. The others
rebelled in their own ways. The Dreamer drew deeper into her chosen
realities, spilling echoes of her dreams out into the world. The King of
Nothing withdrew even further from all other living things, his aching
need for solitude becoming so great that even others could feel it.
 Menoth could not stand for this rebellion; he could not abide one
of his own, to whom he had given such power and authority, rising
up against him. So the Creator summoned his unfathomable power
and let loose his fiery wrath. The Heretic’s city he smote with an
earthquake, rattling the stones of Acrennia and cursing the land to be
poisoned forever after. The leaders of the Heretic’s armies he burned
to ash, condemning their souls to wander helplessly through the rubble
of their city. The rest he bound in agonizing chains of burning brass
and forced them to watch their champions receive divine castigation.
For the Child, the Wanderer, the Dreamer, the King of Nothing, and
the Heretic, he reserved his cruelest punishment. One by one he looked
down on the Defiers as they demonstrated their refusal of the gift of
civilization he had bestowed upon humankind, and he proclaimed:

 “ Who
are these  who dare
 refuse me? Who is
this who claims to be
 my equal? I am the maker of man.
 I am the Giver of the Flame, the
 Sheaf, the Wall, and the Law. For
 your insolence, you will face a world
 without my mercy—a just reward
 for defiant children such as you! 

 ”
  And as Menoth smote the world, he cracked the barrier between
Caen and Urcaen like the shell of an egg, opening an ever-widening
fissure between the lands of the living and the dead. The Defiers
looked down into the howling abyss, into the endless churning wilds
of Urcaen, where spirit beasts tore at each other with their spectral
talons and teeth.
By the power of the Maker of Man, the Defiers were cast down, still
alive, into the hell of Urcaen, a place of spirit where no living things
had ever stepped. It was, and is, a world where their special gifts and
extraordinary natures would avail them nothing, where the hungry
spirit beasts of the Devourer Wurm would torment them with tooth
and claw. There the Defiers would not age, nor could they die, for time
did not flow as it does on Caen. Their tortured bodies would endure
suffering beyond comprehension across an eternal cycle with no
ordered cycle of day and night to mark time’s passage.
But the Heretic, the last of the Defiers to plummet into the chasm,
spat a proclamation at his Creator as he fell, a prophecy set against
the rotten fruits of Menoth’s work, a curse from the accursed. Bound
together with the others by his disobedience and refusal of Menoth, he
issued a prophecy and declaration against Menoth’s great works:
  “
 Since this land was first turned
 for the bounty it would grow ,
 Stood fast one truth that all mortal men know ,
Choose ye wrong or choose ye right,
 Feed ye darkness or feed ye light,
At the end of your days,
 you shall reap what you sow.

 ”
 And with the Heretic’s direful words, the five Defiers vowed to
return to Caen someday. They knew the power of their own souls would
eventually free them from their prison, and when that came to pass
they would rattle civilization and snuff out its corrupt, black heart.
They would punish all who accepted Menoth’s gifts to the detriment of
others. They would reap a Wicked Harvest from humankind.
  
   s  i 
p  
r i   
 ’
    
s     i  n  g .
s 
r  a 
 c   n 
    n   o  w ,
   a  n  d f e l   t 
o  f  U w  a  n  d e r e r g  o  e  s 
 t    f  i    l  d s  w 
 Oh w  a  l  k  o  n  h e   r e  t  e   f  a r b   l  o w 
N�  e  k  n  o w s   h  i  m  w  e   a      i 
s   g 
 n 
 c  a  h  i  m  t      
r ,
   s �  v  
r y 
 S  � f  o  T rh  a     a 
c   n   a 
  
h  r u  s    U  n  o w   o w .
rc  a  e  n ,  
  h     e 
i    d
 l   s    f 
o   s 
 Oh w  a  l  k   W   s h a    r   a p w h a   w   
 t   
 e f 

 Chapter 3
The Hells of Urcaen

T he world of the dead was not made for the living. When first the
Defiers arrived in the infinite expanse of the spirit world, they were
tiny, vulnerable things, unable to defend themselves against the hungry
roaming spirits of that place. They tried to fight against the beasts of
Urcaen, but even with the talents they had honed in life they could not
hold back the agonies of hell. When they tired and could fight no more,
the mercurial hunters of the spirit world would fall upon them.
Even the Defiers’ own thoughts betrayed them. When they
collapsed in exhaustion from their endless running and hiding, they
 were overtaken by terrible nightmares. Given power by the essence
of Urcaen, their nightmares had solidity and will, birthed whole and
hungry from their minds. For unnumbered years, the Defiers had not
a moment of peace. But though they were forgotten and abandoned to
their fate, their inner resolution remained.

Time in hell warped the bodies and minds of the Defiers. Endlessly
they suffered at the claws, teeth, and blades of their tormentors. Their
fears were given life anew to chew at their flesh and slowly took on
new and stranger bestial forms. Torment was the Defiers’ crucible,
burning away any weakness or fear they may still have had and
replacing it with toughened scar tissue. Their minds grew inured to
the terror and agony, though the only defense of a mind exposed to
such things is to become uniquely mad. Each moment of suffering
made them stronger, more able to withstand the coming tortures.
Mortal ages passed on Caen, civilizations rose and fell, before they
 a  r    e m  o   a  n  s ,
rose out of pain and fear and madness.  t   e 
 l  ,  e 
h   e .
 g 
 H e  a r   e r  e  c  l  a  n  k  i  n  g  c  a 
 a 
 d r e  a  d t 
r e
 t   g o r e  h o un
  d
   
’s  ba le  f  u l ba yi n  g   ,
He a   f or  de  f y in  g   y e m us  t   pa y! 
 Through this process of spiritual destruction and rebirth, the
Defiers learned to further harness and shape their unique powers.
They learned to control the spirit world around them, treating the
landscape of hell as a canvas for their dreams to work upon. They
learned to shackle even their own nightmares and force them to yield
to the Defiers’ incomparable wills.

Though they were together, they walked their own separate paths
through the darkness. As their minds and spirits had been remade by
the trials of hell, the Defiers discovered that their bodies, the true flesh
that clothed them, were subject to their own control.
Spirit and flesh had become one. The pain the
Defiers faced in Urcaen could only be
deadened, not eliminated entirely,
but in time they learned to endure,
even as they planned their eventual
escape. They were no longer condemned to
hell: as they embraced their diverse powers,
they became hell’s masters.
  Chapter 4 W h is   pe  r   s 
i n t e s ha   
d 
Birth of the Grymkin d ar   k t a le   s o  f te  n   -ot  ws   
t ei r   m ea  n    o ld   
i ng   s f  e w n 
m e re   s t  o 
or  i e  s   , d  w u n de  r  s    a  n  d  — 
im   a nd   

T hose who bore witness to the Defiers’ acts of rebellion, and those o ld   
 who watched as Menoth cast them into hell, remembered those five
ungovernable souls and shared stories of their disobedience. They retold
the legends as cautionary tales to their children. In the light of crackling
logs or swinging whale-oil lanterns, the Defiers’ stories spread in quiet
 whispers and drunken rants. Across the bogs and fields of the world, the
legends of the Defiers grew and changed over time, as tales of those who
foolishly stood like oaks against the burning wrath of a god.
Grandmothers’ stories and fathers’ warnings came down through
the generations like the white tendrils of a weed, taking firm root in
the fertile soil of imagination. Generation after generation spun these
tales, wheedling out fireside epics with their hushed words, always
adding to the legend and embellishing it. Though they were told as
 warnings, in many of these tales was a hint of admiration for those
 who rebelled, drawn from long-buried dreams of lost freedom.
 Away in their prison, the five heard the tinny echoes of the tales
that grew around them. They supped on those fables and mopped up
each honeyed word with the crust of childish fears, rejoicing in the
sweet flavor it offered them in their trackless confinement. The Defiers
seized the stories with greedy fingers, pulling in each new-spun tale
and holding it tight, basking in the comforting warmth it spread in
their aching meat and frozen bones. In turn, they passed their own
stories back to those able to hear them. Through dreams brought on
by fevers, the Defiers whispered clarity into the minds of storytellers.
To the unquiet imaginations of certain men they showed visions of the
hell they inhabited. And so, as the stories from above helped to shape
and refine their appetites and bodies, they fed their own stories back
to the world of the living to magnify their legends.
 As years went by and the stories grew and multiplied and changed,
the Defiers caught sight of others doing what they never could: passing
through the veil that separates the world of the living from the world of
the dead. These were the souls of the deceased, who took a road barred to
the Defiers on the way to their afterlife. Each pious soul hoped to arrive
safely in Menoth’s ever-expanding city in Urcaen, while others wandered
lost and doomed in the trackless wilds, never to find their final reward.
It was the wayward souls that drew the attention of the Defiers,
especially the Heretic. By their very nature these lost souls felt inexorably
drawn to the Defiers, their wandering paths not as directionless as they
thought. Tales told of the Defiers on Caen had paved unseen roads to their
realm in hell, routes of least resistance opened by the fears and doubts
of those who were wicked in life and whose fates were already linked by
the legends of the five. Men and women who had committed sins against
their fellows feared facing the Defiers after death, and that fear forged an
unbreakable chain pulling them to their inevitable punishments.
Urcaen had never been kind to the impious—to the doubters, the lax,
the selfishly cruel and the lazily greedy. Such souls arrived in the afterlife
far from the realms of the gods and there became easy prey for monstrous
creatures, forced to run from myriad horrors dwelling in the shifting
expanse of Urcaen’s hell. In their terror they took what seemed the easiest
path—down rocky hills, along cleared trails through chattering woods,
following the banks of icy rivers. All of these paths took them straight to
the Defiers, who waited for them in vast dreamscapes they had carved
for themselves. Each of these wayward souls was seized and scrutinized,
laid bare by the Heretic or another of the five who read the history of their
lives and transgressions engraved into their very being. Lives were peeled
back year by year like the layers of an onion, revealing secret hopes, deep-
dwelling fears, and long-buried regrets and humiliations.
Examining these souls, the Defiers confirmed the truth of
the conclusions they had drawn at the outset of their rebellion:
mortals had been marred by the foul fruits that thrived in Menoth’s
 “
Mortals had been
marred by the
foul fruits that
thrived in Menoth’s
civilization.
”
civilization. Drunkards, cowards, liars, cheats, the vain and jealous,
all twisted by their shallow lives. The Defiers saw what each soul was
truly made of, and with the power they had seized, they saw fit to pass
judgment on them. The Defiers acted as a fractured mirror for the
spirits before them, reflecting their iniquities. In those reflections
the souls saw themselves as the wretched beings they were, having
lived their lives at the expense of others. They had wielded the Gifts
of Menoth like weapons, using them purely to better their own selfish
lives. In the plight of their victims, the Defiers saw a reflection of their
own unjust suffering at Menoth’s hands, and the righteous anger
of the five helped to fuel their transformation. The essence of the
 wayward souls was reshaped to better match the sins within each.
That which is dead cannot normally live again, but the powers of the
Defiers allowed these spirits a different sort of afterlife, one that would
eventually permit a return to Caen. Fueled by the Defiers’ judgments, T he  y 
  h a v 
a n d s � s h a s u f  
  f  e re   d 
the natural laws that preserve a soul’s coherence were overwritten and  w e a  .,
replaced. This gave these spirits new and grotesque bodies and minds,
utterly removed from their past lives. Hearkening to the old stories that
cautioned against the very sins for which they had been judged, and guided
by the Defiers’ mad dreams, these souls took on wholly new forms. Each
 was bound up with some old story or legend, a folktale or child’s rhyme.
These became the grymkin. The Defiers discovered that grymkin
 were not as firmly bound to Urcaen as either the Defiers themselves or
the ordinary spirits of the dead. Each time a new soul crossed from the
land of the living into the realm of the dead, its passage left a temporary
pinprick in the barrier between these worlds. These small gateways soon
closed of their own accord and were too small to allow the passage of
anything in return, especially the powerful Defiers; in this, their own
magnificence betrayed them. Yet grymkin, with their peculiar and
chimerical forms, could slip through the smallest pinprick with ease.
Every time a dead spirit passes, there is a small chance a grymkin will
leap back into the world of the living, balancing the scales.
The Defiers instructed the growing throng of grymkin to lie in wait
for these small doors to open and to return to Caen at every opportunity.
Sometimes many souls tumbled through at once, such as at the height of
 a great battle where death was thick, and a throng of grymkin could rush
back through the other way. The Heretic studied these passages with
a scholar’s eye. Nights when the moons were dark or the stars aligned
in certain ways let more powerful grymkin through, as did the deaths
of innocent men and women who fell victim to Menoth’s cruel justice.
More failed to cross than succeeded, but each who made it through was
a small victory, a way for the Defiers to change Caen, however indirectly,
and to pave the way for a greater reckoning to come. Grymkin used the
 wars of humanity to their own advantage, slipping through unnoticed
like bilge rats stowing away in the hold of a great ship.
 And so, over the long years of the Defiers’ imprisonment,
numerous grymkin crossed over from Urcaen. Each was filled with
a desire to bring mischief and danger to the world of the living,
 .  ..
  r
  n   d    r  d  e to invoke fear and nightmares, to punish the wicked. They felt
  a    o
  e  s   o  u  
  s
    l 
  r
compelled by their very natures to seek those whose souls had been
   i   t 
    b  e  w
  m 
  u marked by the same corruption that defined their own shaping.
  n 
 .  ..
Each kind of grymkin hungered for a certain flavor of sin, a specific
 variety of blemish and weakness. Sin called to sin. Murderers sought
out murderers and thieves sought out thieves. Some grymkin even
possessed the power to transform others to become like them,
spreading their nature like an infection.
The seemingly capricious ways of the grymkin inspired yet
more folk stories. Those who happened to witness the grymkin
claiming their victims would share their tales, delighting in the
madness and the macabre, savoring these dark parables of morality
and punishment. In time, through trial and error, rustic peoples
learned some of the rules grymkin must abide by, their often peculiar
 vulnerabilities. These too were shared from father to son, from mother
to daughter, down through the years. As cities rose and grew, pushing
back the dark forests and hidden places where the grymkin lurked, the
truth behind these tales was slowly forgotten. But hidden within most
nursery rhymes and bedtime stories were hints of truths about the
grymkin, though not their origins or deeper purpose.
The grymkin sowed the seeds of the Wicked Harvest for centuries,
seeds the Defiers and their army of nightmares would reap when the
time was right.
 “
The grymkin sowed
the seeds of the
 Wicked Harvest for
centuries.
”
  Chapter 5
 o
 g   f  r  t 
 d
e  n e w.
 e
The Old Witch
 o l  d  e v n 
 t  p r
 S h  s   �

T he key that would unlock the Defiers’ eternal prison first began to
take form long, long ago. In the earliest of days, far in the north
in the barren lands of ice and biting wind, something keen-eyed and
razor-taloned lurked in a cave. It watched as Menoth walked the world
and saw the first people of the north as they emerged from nothingness.
 When it was hungry it would sneak out in the night and snatch one
of them, dragging the corpse back to its cave where it would drink the
blood and chew the bones. After a time, the thing in the cave began to
appreciate the northern folk for more than the flavor in their blood and
meat. It began to savor the strength of their spirits and to relish the taste
of their ambitions and dreams. It learned to appreciate the vintage of
their fears. It saw the merits of influencing them.
Gradually, this being took on a new form, one which more closely
resembled humankind. Emerging from the shadows of the cave, it
 walked among the northerners as a stooped and weathered crone,
garbed in a cloak stitched together from the time-worn hides of
countless kills. It had come to learn the tongue of the northerners
from their screams and their whimpering pleas. It learned the name
the people whispered when they spoke of it, and it found the name
pleasing: Zevanna Agha. In time they would come to know her simply
as the Old Witch. She became a sort of steward of the northmen,
bearing a strange affection for them and an unutterable link to their
bloodlines. She saw how Menoth’s gifts could be put to another use,
to make her favored northern tribes flourish. She encouraged them
to build up their cities, though she cautioned them to always remain
rooted in the wild places. Almost alone of beings on Caen, she walked
in both places comfortably.
The Old Witch had seen the
t he Defiers stand against Menoth and had
listened to the Heretic’s pronouncement as they were thrown into the
hells of Urcaen. The unmistakable ring of prophecy prickled at her
ears. The Heretic’s words were more than mere words. The oath the
Defiers swore that day was a pact that would be burned indelibly into
their souls, fueled by their hatred for the corruption that spilled out of
Menoth’s civilization wherever it grew.
This act caught the attention of the Old Witch, but she is ever
cunning, always scheming, devising ways to turn the fate of the world
to her own ends. And so she stowed away the memory in her vast
library of thoughts and dreams and left it there until a need for it arose
in the world.
That need came with the creatures of the outer darkness, things B 
l  
a  c k  
k s 
  
neither of the physical world nor of Urcaen but from a lightless  s  w  n a  k  e  s 
i  m  m   e n  n 
place beyond them both. Greedy for the power of human souls, these i  n  g   t  w  i  n e 
i  n a   d   d,  
beings of shadow have long probed their fingers into the lands of the o  c  e   v  a  
a  n   s  t  
living, offering promises and power in return for that which they l  i  k  e  
o  i  l  
covet the most.
Long after Menoth locked the Defiers away, a young woman called
Thamar—who
Thamar—who turned out to be not so different from the Defiers
themselves—and
themselves—and her brother Morrow discovered the power to
t o ascend
as a god. When the Orgoth came and put the people of her lands to the
t he
 whip and chain,
chain, Thamar was asked by her brother
brother to make a pact
pact with
the sinister oathmakers dwelling in the dark beyond to empower her
people with sorcerous gifts.
The bargain she offered these entities demanded a payment that
Thamar knew could never be paid—one which might threaten the
t he very
nature of the balance between Caen and Urcaen. Like the Old Witch
of the north, this self-made goddess knew the Defiers waited in hell.
She knew that when they ultimately escaped, they would be anathema
to the degenerate humans the creatures of darkness need in order to
thrive. So, with the dark masters from beyond eager to bargain with
her and unaware of the fate that awaited them should the Defiers one
day be freed, the woman agreed to their terms.
 As decades and
and centuries spun forward,
forward, as the wheels
wheels of heaven
turned in the sky, the dark masters did find people in the world who
 were as foul and greedy as they, and
and they made inroads
inroads into the world
world
through shadowy pacts with these men and women. Such wicked
humans were living testaments to the warnings the Defiers had
uttered, proof in the flesh of the seeming flawed fruit Menoth’s gifts
had wrought.
 While the weakness
weakness in humankind that
that Menoth introduced
introduced may
have helped precipitate the dark masters finding open and vulnerable
T  h e e D 
souls, the unfathomable threat stood clearly apart from Menoth. Even e e f  
 i e er r  s 
  t  
in hell the Defiers paid heed to the fragmented stories that reached l i ik k  e e     s t  
h u 
un n   g gr r  y 
i r r 
  w  l l v 
  i i  n n  e e i ir r   c o oa 
w i i 
 v  s 
s   
their ears. They stirred, taking note of events in living history for the a g ge e   .
first time since their imprisonment, and they watched the influence of
those bound to the darkness spread.
In time, the number of those willing to pledge their souls to the
dark masters swelled. The greed in their hearts, fed by the luxuries
their power granted them, grew until they were willing to swear it all
away for more power, more wealth, more comfort in life. Hiding at the
fringes of the settled places, they worked in shadow toward their own
ends, but all the while they gave their dark masters the opportunity to
look upon the world of mortal men. With clear eyes, these inscrutable
beings scouted the lands and prepared to claim the world and all
human souls as their own.
Zevanna Agha foresaw the darkness that was coming and knew
that she alone could not stop it. As the number of its agents piercing
the barrier between worlds grew, she knew she faced an apocalypse.
The armies of humankind had grown vast, and they commanded
 weapons built of technology
technology married
married to magic, but even
even the greatest
mechanika and the mightiest champions would be inadequate to face
the horrors shaped by the outer darkness.
 So too would the armies of the wilds be insufficient. For too long
they had torn at one another’s throats. They had learned to wield might
and magic and to command terrifying beasts, but they were too easily
distracted with old squabbles and schemes to help hold the darkness back.
Instead, the Old Witch turned to the Defiers. If she threw open
the doors of their eternal cage, whatever they had become, whatever
emerged into the physical world once more, would tear at the roots of
the Iron Kingdoms to find the corruption within. The murky border
between civilization and the wilds was a common hiding place for
 wicked men and women working in the shadows. If the Defiers set
loose their harvest, they were certain to claim the malfeasants who
 were the greatest allies the dark masters had on Caen. As the grymkin
took their toll, they would provide a warning to others who might fall
to similar corruption.
S e   b ac   k  But it would be a painful harvest they claimed. The wicked would
t e c lo  c   k:  
 ic   k b  y  oc  k    reap what they had sown as the Defiers punished them for their
misdeeds. In unleashing them upon the world, Zevanna Agha would
be injecting poison into a sick body in the hope that it would kill the
deadly parasites within before it killed the patient. And despite the
 work of the Wicked Harvest, there would always be corruption in the
hearts of humans. There would always be an abundance of foolish
mortals seeking power. But the Defiers and their motley throng could
slow the encroachment of the darkness into Caen and give her more
time to prepare for its arrival.
The Old Witch considered all of this, weighing the benefit of
having such potent allies to fight the darkness against the trouble and
chaos the Defiers would bring with them. Finally, she made her choice
and threw open the doors of Urcaen. But the witch was canny and
always made sure to stack events in her own favor, so she carefully set
aside individuals who would one day help her drive back the Defiers
and their children should their menace prove to be greater than their
aid to her and her designs.
  Chapter 6
The Wicked Harvest Begins

Z evanna Agha scoured the world for clues about the Defiers to
help her as she worked to set them free. She captured grymkin
and pulled them apart in her claws to discern their makers’ marks.
She consorted with madmen who claimed that voices in the walls
spoke to them unfathomable truths. She watched from a distance
 S h e      �
  c  a m e  as witches danced and howled around blazing fires, holding crude
 s � m an   y 
o  f u  s . . . totems of the Wanderer and the Child. She listened to the scattered
prophecies of fortunetellers and sages, hearing within their
divinations occasional seeds of truth. Everywhere she looked, she
found scraps and hints left by the five.
Piece by piece, the Old Witch pulled together her plan. With a
host of minions she had cajoled, bribed, and manipulated, she would
build a great device to rip at the warp and weft of reality. With it she
could pull open a tear between the worlds. The most difficult piece of
the puzzle was to find a means to communicate with the Defiers, to
find the hidden patch of Urcaen they claimed as their kingdom. While
she could force grymkin to obey her will, their capriciousness was so
deeply rooted in their essence that they proved useless as messengers
to reach their creators. She required a mortal conduit.

The solution came in the form of a young noblewoman. Driven

mad by loss and grief, Lady Karianna Rose resided in an institution
for the insane. Her breed of madness had drawn a flock of invisible
grymkin to her side. She treated the little things like her own children,
 who were now dead in the grave. The love she felt for her grymkin was
genuine, and they would do anything for her in return.
 Zevanna Agha whispered into Lady Karianna’s dreams. The
hopes and fears spawned by these whispers affected her grymkin
companions and were eventually perceived by Defiers, especially the
far-roaming mind of the Dreamer. At times a death was required
to allow a grymkin to return with a cryptic message to its greater
masters, which seemed to the Old Witch a small price to pay. In this
indirect way, these ancient and unknowable powers conspired through
the sleeping babble of an insane woman.

The Old Witch had other conspirators to assist with the completion
of her great machine, foremost among them the founder of a secretive
group dedicated to investigating the supernatural. The device they
built combined Zevanna Agha’s cunning with the power of mortal
ingenuity, and its completion enabled her to crack open a gateway to
hell through which the Defiers could return to the world at long last.

 When the time was right, Zevanna Agha pierced a hole in the
 veil between worlds, and out of that portal strode the Defiers. They
emerged with a deep and primal hunger that reached down to their
 very souls, a burning need to fulfill the promise they had made so long
ago to reap their due from the debased hearts of civilized men. The
 world was much changed since their banishment, but the corruption
they foresaw resided in every corner of the land.

The Defiers had much work to do, but they would not be alone.
The moment the five emerged from hell, every grymkin in the world
felt an irresistible tug. They abandoned their mischief, leaving cruel
tricks half-finished and clever traps unsprung, and journeyed to
meet their makers.
 DEFIERS
 There are no beings on Caen, living or dead,
 which are like the Defiers.
 T h er   e i s a p 
la  c   e  w h er   e w e w 
i   g � 
T ha     o nl  y  e 
D e f  ie   rs   k n ow   .

T h ey   w a it   f or   u 

s f ar  ,  f a r be lo  w   
—
And  w e sha  c a t em  mas er.

Sin
ce their banishment to hell, the original names of the Defiers have been lost to a fog of
myth and superstition. Instead, they are most commonly identified by the fundamental
concepts that each represent: the Child, the Dreamer, the Heretic, the King of Nothing,
the Wanderer. In backwater communities, however, and among other superstitious folk who for countless
generations have told their tales, the five are called by myriad names. To the swampies of northern Cygnar,
the Heretic is known as Father Stoneface, while to the Kossites of Khador he is gyordi listoy, or “The Proud-
Faced One.” Legends of the Defiers can be found in all corners of western Immoren, and the local stories
about them are obscured by an accidental conspiracy to cloak the truth of their origins in mystery.

The tales of their defiance of Menoth have
been misattributed, altered, and reconfigured over
thousands of years. Not even the Defiers themselves
can recall the exact details of their lives or of the
transition to their new existences. The pain they
endured fractured their minds, and in scraping
up the pieces they have allowed fragments of the
legends about them to join the disjointed mosaic
of their memories. They choose for themselves
the parts of the stories they like and hold them as
absolute truths. Even when their stories clash and
contradict each other, the Defiers cling to these
tales. Since their wills can bend mortal memory and
reality itself, separating truth from fiction with the
Defiers is almost impossible.
In the days that followed the banishment of the
Defiers, those who viewed them as great spirits
or angry gods gathered together. Rural folk in
some isolated regions see the five as dangerous
and powerful beings and will attempt to placate
them and avoid their attentions. Countless remote
communities have modest shrines to one or more of
the Defiers, garlanded with trinkets and offerings
intended to ward off their wrath. These gestures
please the Defiers: the pleas of frightened travelers
stopped at such a crossroad shrine or the cautionary
nursery rhymes cooed by a grandmother to her
grandchildren might not be true worship, but the
Defiers bathe in it as if such words were prayers.
 The Defiers are both the authors of the Wicked
Harvest and its singular masters. Each commands a
diverse legion of grymkin and a host of nightmares
pulled from Urcaen into the world of the living. No
dissension exists among the ranks of the Wicked
Harvest—the will of the Defiers is absolute and
incontestable.
There is no true leader among the five. Though
the Heretic styles himself as the foremost of the
Defiers, in truth they are equal in power over the
grymkin. They have little need to debate matters,
for the eons they spent together in hell allows each
one to know the desires of the others. They have
their own distinct plans and agendas, and they tend
to give each other leeway even when they disagree.
It is rare for them to truly work together, though
it is even more rare for one to stand in the way
of another. When a conflict occurs, the one who
disagrees with the others will go off for a time to
pursue his or her own agenda but will always return
again. Urcaen forced them together for so long that
not one of them, not even the King of Nothing, is
ever truly apart from the others. They can feel one
another’s presence no matter the distance between
them, whispering into each other’s minds and
dreams with but a thought.
The one pursuit in which they are absolutely
united by purpose is the Wicked Harvest. Nothing
can shake them from punishing the wicked among
humankind, from forcing the corrupt to reap the
fruits of their foul labor. But they are not united in
 vision. Each defied Menoth in a unique way, and
each desires to reap what is due according to his or
her own whims. The Heretic despises the faith of
Menoth most of all and wishes to see its choirs made
mute and its temples ground to dust. The Wanderer
loathes the walls of human civilization more than
anything else and would see them flattened, and the
Child would see all mortal children freed from the
chains of their parents’ subjugation by making them
orphans. The Dreamer, in her unbroken trance of
somnolent visions, secretly desires that all humanity
 would join in her everlasting slumber. Hating all
creation and everything in it, the King of Nothing
seeks to render Caen a vast field of nothingness,
devoid of man, beast, and his fellow Defiers alike.
Each Defier is an ageless creature of
unfathomable power that borders on godhood.
They have transcended the limitations of the flesh
to embody the nature of their individual defiance.
Even their own bodies are a reflection of this
essence, deceptive to behold. Some, like the Child
and the King of Nothing, inhabit bodies that look
 weak and frail, but they nonetheless command a
strength that can lay low the mightiest champions
of the living world. All of this is the unwitting gift
of Menoth’s punishment. Urcaen burned away their
 weaknesses. It molded and refined them. In the
millennia of their imprisonment they learned how
to wield the power that resides in their souls, and in
so doing they magnified that power immeasurably.
Some of the Defiers, like the Dreamer and the
 Wanderer, had in their previous lives shown only a
timid echo of the forces that they would command
once they walked Caen again. What they did in
those days was done by pure reflex and instinct, not
design. All of them have since had the opportunity
to embrace the true arcane strength in their souls.
They have tested and taught one another to coax out
that inner strength. Now, each of the Defiers has
the power to replace the fabric of the real world with
things that are far more pleasing to them.
 All magic, be it the systematic arcane arts
of the Iron Kingdoms or the unbridled sorcery
of the wilderness, is an expression of willpower
over reality. Magic coaxes reality into doing the
impossible, whether summoning a mystic storm of
ice or commanding the very earth to split asunder.
The power of the Defiers approaches that of the
gods in its ability to remake the very substance of
the world, at least for a time.
 When the Defiers wield magic, they allow a
shred of their nightmare reality to bleed into Caen.
The Defiers’ twisted dreamscapes bubble and churn
to the surface like infectious madness. The trees
curl around the five, and the ground heaves beneath
their tread. Reality is reshaped into forms that are
more pleasing and familiar to the Defiers, taking
on the cast of their own individual patches of hell,
softening to their subconscious desires and their
conscious whims. To face one of the five, one must
first pass through an impossible world that obeys
only the fancies of that Defier.
Though this power is impressive, the Defiers
are at their most terrifying when someone’s actions
align with or violate the invisible, mystical rules
 written on the Defier’s own souls. Like the grymkin
they created, each Defier is bound up by their denial
of civilization. As they were shaped and reshaped
in hell, as each of them embraced ever more tightly
their own identities and powers, these strictures
became ingrained deep in their very nature. The
rules are countless and obscure, unknown even
to the Defiers themselves, but if someone in their
presence breaks these supernatural codes, a Defier’s
power bursts forth to shake the world to its core.
 The Old Witch is not counted among the Defiers,
but she is similarly immortal and draws on ancient
powers related to her nature and her ties to the
northern lands. Her power also has rules known
only to her and can flare to greater strength under
special circumstances. Like the Defiers, Zevanna
 Agha is a creature of legend and folktales, and her
clawed fingers touch the nightmares of humankind.
 Without her, the Defiers may have remained in
Urcaen, the promise of the Wicked Harvest forever
unfulfilled.
To show their gratitude for loosing them from
Urcaen, the Defiers have given the Old Witch
authority over a host of grymkin and nightmares.
She in return uses grand arcane devices to punch
holes through reality, allowing new armies of the
 Wicked Harvest to tumble into the world. Only
the Old Witch has this power. Should Zevanna
 Agha ever turn her back on the Defiers, they know
she could one day condemn them to Urcaen once
more—or worse, trap them on Caen with an ever-
dwindling host by their side.
  H
 T  E D R EA M E R
ASMS & P HA N T
 n d e r ed  b y rea l i t y.
e, u n h  i
er ed r
f  om  wa ki ng li f 
  n d
 h
 l y, un te t
S H E DR I F TS f ree
.

 re  m s   b o  u

s he d a   n
She is the Drea me r, a nd  n  a n
 d  u
 d e
 n b i d
 bo t h u
H er   d 
re  a  m  s 
ar e no t l u 
ci  d , bu t  f or 
mless and ev er changing
and she 
,

F LOAT S upon t he sw irling eddies of emotion t he y s tir u p.

 A  l l t hings of  the  w aking w or ld ar e t o he r j u 

st
  

DI STANT echoes, hal f  -he ar d 

and ha 
em
   e m  lf    - r 
as  s he    b er   e 
 p a ss  e    d , 
s f  r o 
m o 
n e d  
r ea   
m t  
o t  h 
 r e  n 
a  r o u n d h e e  x  t  
e s  h
 t e  w o  r  ld .
S he s hap

spontaneous l y,
 y o f  S L E E P WA L K E
 R S
attended  b y an arm  n s.
 r  
 in g v i s i o
i n h er g  r a n d s l u m b e
 who s ha re

er po wer to shape
 A mong a l l of us,  h
M o m  and alter the  world is second to none.
a nd     e nt   
w i t h  t o m 
o ut 
  e  o m 
e nt 
  s 
ve   n  he 
  b 
r es 
  h  t h i n  i rt  h   
k in  g  s 
a  p i  
n g  
 
s he 
  a  P  H  A  N  
i  t  i  
n t  o  l  t er    T  A  S  M  
w  h 
s t h 
e v  e  S  a n d  
i  m  r y  
  f    f   
a n t  
s ic  
  a  l  e s  a s  i  
l  A    h o  e  s  
N   D    f   t  h   ,
S   P   E    e  c  
o r  r  
C   T   A    u  p 
C   U   L    t  
 ,
A   R   
F   O   R   
M   S    .
  n
 i  s  t
 t
 e  g
 n
 li d  n,  n o pleasure there for m 
 ow e, b e c 
 o
 o
 g d a  u 
 s  n o t h
 i n g s 
e 
r ’
 e

I   
a  
m  
t     
h     
e    
W     
a      
n  
e 
d  
r 
e   r ,

 b   l
 l
 ’ I . d
 n
 u
 o
    r
    ’
    e
    l
 b      m
  a      r
  d
  n
       a
        e
             v
        o
       r

       o
           t

    r
   o
     f
  n
   o
    s
     i
    r
  p 

      m
     o
      r
        f
       e
  e
 r
  f

  n
  e
  k
        o
 u m I  a
 n
 d
       r
        b  w  s
 t
 a
 n
 d
       e  e
 r
       v
       ’  f
 r
  I  e
 e
 .
 .
  n
 Y
 o
 w
 u
 r
  w      o
  d  a
 l 
 l 
 s
 e
  m  t
 h
 e
 a
     w
   o
   l   s
  ’   n      w   s  n
 c y
   n
    o
 t    e   t
   a
   g     r  o y ; e m d
    u  l o  o
 h t
NIGHTMARES
 The original nightmare beasts
 were given flesh the very moment the
first Defier dreamed in Urcaen.
 Wh e n c e c o me  s   t e 
F le  s  h   o  f a n i gh    m  a   r e? 

 I  m a ke   s i s   o w n .

E
merged from hell to stride alongside the Defiers is an army born of their darkest tormented dreams.
Given bodies of flesh and blood, these nightmares are bonded to the ones they once preyed upon.
The horrifying capabilities of these beasts were honed by millennia of hunting their creators across
the wastes of Urcaen before being bound to the Defiers’ will. Despite the fact that they now obey the Defiers,
the physical bodies and essence of these supernatural creatures are a reflection of the deepest, most secret
fears of their five progenitors.

The generative power of living souls in the spirit
realm caused the Defiers’ dreamstuff to solidify
into bones and flesh, chains and teeth. Perhaps
the nightmares gave the formless and hungry
spirits of the void shapes they could adopt. Perhaps
they needed no such aid to take living forms. Not
even the Defiers could ever know for sure. All they
understood was that each night of sleep brought
 with it a fresh host of horrors.
The Defiers’ mortal minds and therefore their
dreams were strongly affected by the chaotic and
malevolent landscape of Urcaen’s wilds, which
in turn are said to be a manifestation of the
 Wurm’s own dark dreams. Slumber brought only
nightmares born from the unyielding fear they
experienced, and those nightmares were enhanced
by the underlying malice and cruelty that permeated
the Devourer’s hunting grounds.
Twisted and mercurial in their earliest
incarnation, these nightmares had protean forms.
They were shifting entities of shadow and noise that
bristled with cruel weapons. Over time, however,
they began to wear the skins of the Defiers’ worst
fears. Each new night of fevered dreaming imbued
them with greater power and form.
The Wanderer’s nightmares were filled with
restraints and cages, so his dreams would bind and
cage him. The King of Nothing had nightmares of
being trapped among babbling, mindless crowds, so
his dreams were garbed with murmuring faces and
pulled him in close. The Child dreamed of hungry
shadows that chased her through the wilds and
ugly things that mocked her fears. The Heretic saw
the masked face of the Creator glaring at him and
remembered when he had felt compelled to rend his
own skin in supplication. His proud hate was made
manifest in a threshing beast of metal and flesh.
 In the beginning, each Defier could recognize Though the Defiers were exceptionally powerful
the beasts created by his or her own dreams. They individuals, they struggled to fight the hellish
bore clear marks to tell of their origin. As the creatures that endlessly tormented them. The battle
nightmares hunted their creators and tortured  was futile. The nightmares were too strong, and
them over uncountable centuries, though, these the five too fragile. And even if they did manage to
tormentors became the nightmares of the other destroy one of the beasts, the next night the Defiers
Defiers as well. This mingling of each Defier’s own themselves would give birth to a dozen more, worse
unique essence further strengthened and defined than those that came before.
the nightmares. In time, the influence of a given
Defier became less distinct. The beasts became an
amalgamation of all the Defiers’ fears, empowered
by the collective terror that inspired them.
It was then that the Defiers realized the full horror
of Menoth’s punishment. Though they could not die They could
in Urcaen, they remained mortal and thus remained not escape...
bound by mortal needs. No ephemeral food or drink
in the spirit realm could give them sustenance, leaving
them perpetually thirsty and starved. Their need
for sleep ensured that hungry nightmares forever
stalked the Defiers through Urcaen, chasing them
from one haven to another. When one of the horrors
they spawned caught one of the five, it tore viciously This was Menoth’s ultimate punishment, a fate
at flesh and soul, leaving deep scars that burned  worse than death, meant to be inflicted throughout
and ached for ages, even though their bodies healed all eternity upon the arrogant humans who had
 with inhuman speed. No matter the severity of their spurned him. For all his power, however, Menoth
 wounds or the intensity of their anguish, the Defiers fell prey to the same flaw that had given rise to the
 were denied the mercy of death’s release. Defiers in the first place: a belief in his infallible
might and an underestimation of the power within
The Defiers considered splitting up and going
their once-mortal souls. For while the Defiers were
to the far corners of Urcaen, hoping that the beasts
prisoners, he failed to realize how they would bend
might leave one or more of them alone in favor of
their minds to the task of escaping from his prison— 
the others. But when they tried, they were harried
how even this torment would itself, in the fullness of
and corralled back together, for the nightmares
time, strengthen them.
 were stronger when they could draw on the sleeping
dread of the whole group and thus desired the
Defiers to remain united.
 Each of the Defiers would be needed to break
free of their torments, though they did not at first
acknowledge their mutual dependence. The Heretic
saw that of all of them, the Dreamer suffered the
least from the nightmares. As the energy of Urcaen
slowly and subtly altered the Defiers, she never
 woke and instead descended into a kind of constant
sleepwalking reverie. Rather than the horrendous
nightmares the rest of them birthed, she instead
created weaker and less haunting dreams of
baffling shape, small and fragile nightmares that
the horrifying things the others dreamed of would
feast upon as eagerly as the Defiers’ own flesh.
The Heretic cast the Dreamer out. He believed
the constant stream of half-formed notions,
daydreams, and tepid nightmares that formed
around her would draw the attention of the larger,
hungrier beasts. These lesser dream-creatures
 would provide the greater nightmares with
nourishment as they clawed at the Dreamer’s flesh,
burned her with acid, fed their monstrous hatred by
tormenting her floating, inert form.
His plan may have helped abate his own
suffering, even if it could not extinguish it. But
he was not the only one working in secret. As the
nightmares closed in on the Dreamer, they failed
to notice the small form of the Child creeping up
on them in the dark. The Child had grown tired
of fear and weary of pain. Over centuries, she
had whispered in the Dreamer’s slumbering ear,
describing a companion who would keep her safe
in this awful, unforgiving world, a protector who
 would do her bidding. Brazenly, she strode up to the
nightmares as they descended on the Dreamer and
taunted them to draw their attention.
Sensing fresh prey, the nightmares turned on
the Child and attacked her. Wracked with pain
under their slashing claws, she howled defiantly for
her new friend, calling out for it by name: “DOLLY!”
The Child’s cries caused the Dreamer to conjure
up the Child’s desired companion—a powerful and
terrible beast that utterly loved the Child as much as
the Child loved it. Fueled by a rage that echoed the
Child’s own, the monstrous Dolly waded in among
the hungry nightmares and laid waste to them,
breaking their bones and rending their flesh with its
massive talons.
 As Dolly crushed and lashed at the host of
nightmares to protect its beloved Child, the other
Defiers saw opportunity. The Wanderer snatched
the King of Nothing and took an impossible step,
dropping them both amid the awful melee. The
aura of withering misery surrounding the King of
Nothing weakened the nightmares, letting Dolly rip
them apart with greater ease.
The Defiers watched with joy as the nightmares
fell. Even the Dreamer’s lips twitched in a lazy
smile when the last of their collective torturers lay
 vanquished on the ground. One by one, the Defiers
confronted their nightmares when they were
most vulnerable and, seeing them in broken heaps,
robbed the nightmares of their power. And one
by one, the Defiers leashed them through force of
 will. Though they remained manifestations of the
Defiers’ deepest fears, they had been changed. They
had become instruments to unleash those fears
upon a world that had bent its knee to Menoth.
 Once the Defiers learned to control their
nightmares, they had a weapon to fight back
against the wilds of Urcaen, to carve out a realm of
their own within the land of death. The nightmares
acted as the guardians of the Defiers’ home,
beating back the wild and shapeless predators of
the spirit world.
Though the nightmares heed the command of
the Defiers, they still assume the shapes of their
inception. Each bears a reminder of their creators’
original nightmares, of the dreams that gave them
life. To look on the form of these beings is to gain
insight into the secret fears of the Defiers.
Each nightmare is a reminder of the torments
the Defiers suffered in hell; each stokes the flames of
their rage at Menoth, who put them there. They feel
no kindness for Morrow or his worshipers either, as
they enjoyed a safe and peaceful domain in Urcaen
 while the Defiers suffered endless torment. When
the enslaved nightmares wade into the fray at their
masters’ behest, the Defiers can drink deeply of the
emotions of carnage and fear that they produce. This
draught is one of the few repasts that is refreshing to
them, and it allows them to continue working their
madness on the world.
Even so, the nightmares sometimes revert to
their old behavior—it is, after all, indelibly writ on
their blood and bones. When one slips the leash
and returns to its old ways, it wantonly slaughters
anything around it in a mad search for one of the
five to attack, resuming its thousand-year-old hunt.
The nightmares remain one of the only things
that can cause lasting harm to a Defier. If there is
anything left that the Defiers fear, it is the moment
 when a nightmare they thought they had enslaved
turns against them.
Some claim to have heard one of these
nightmares hungrily whisper the name of a Defier— 
not the new name of Heretic, Dreamer, or Child, but
the old one, the name a mother once murmured
 while rocking her babe to sleep. For despite all the
power they command, despite their transformation
from mortal flesh into their present forms, each is at
core still human.
 And each
still knows fear.
  G E
 C A
 RA G E R
 Thunde r ing a nd ponde r ous a nd ten
 timbe r s thick, this bea s t s tuf f s
its ca ges with the bodies of  the D r unk o n t he f e a r o f t he w i ck e d ,
wi cked f o r   tsi  ma s te r s  ha  r ves t.
 ’
t he D e f ie r s scul  pt t he w o r l d 
 Wi thi  n this conf inemen t the ri  a cco r d in g t o t he i r d r e a ms.
 to r men ts moun t, a nd the
ca ge r a ge r f e r ments
 the wi ne of  their 
swee t te r  r o r  to
f eed to the
 Def i er s.

o m one p  i
r s one  r   to th e ne    
x t wit h no th ough  t sa  v e a de ep hung e   
r  to pu ni s h. An yone ca  u  
gh t
 The ca ge r a ge r s tomps f  r   to r m  
en ted b y  the l ea  p i n g, g a m boli n g, l a u ghi n
  g g   ymki
r  n
 
i n i ts  gi bbe t suf f er s a f a te w
   
o s
r  e th n
a  dea   th a s  the  y a  e
 r 
 r v es t. Se  r v ed u p a s a g    ymki
r  n
   f e s
a  t, t hei r b odie s  r 
a  e d  a
r  i
 n ed,  mus cles wi t he r  i n g a  n d mi n ds
of  the Wi cked Ha  g es, s   
t i
r p ped  of l if e a  n d love a n d hope , ti l l only old
 twis ting. Thes e p r is one  s
r   r 
a  e  t to
lef  wa  s te w
a   y
a  in  thei r ca 
bones a  r e lef  t behind.
 GOREHOUND
Keep a wa  y f r om t he shadows, chi ld, f or t he gorehound
hunt s fa r a nd wide a t i ts ma st er s biddi ng. As it sta lks
’

i t s pr e y, i t s long t ongue t a stes the a i r for the sweet t a int 

of  cor rupt ion. If  you dr aw i ts a tt ent i on, ther e is no hope of
esca pe no ma tt er wher e you might hide, no ma t t er how f a r or 
how f ast you might  f lee. For  you see, t he gor ehound does not 
tr a vel on the r oa ds of mor t a l men but on hidden pa t hs wendi ng
bet ween wor lds. T her e is no wa ll t ha t ca n slow i t down, no ga t e
t ha t can keep it out .
If  you hea r a sof t chi mi ng i n t he ni ght    , t he gor ehound
comes f or  you. A bell ha n gs f r om t he bea st s colla r ,
a nd i t i s t he gent le ca ll of t hi s bell t ha t you w i ll hea r 
’ 

w hen i t comes f or  you in t he da r k. You a lone w ill hea r 

i t s r i ngi ng, a nd i f you li st en t oo lon g i t w i ll dr i ve you
ma d even bef or e you a r e t a ken b y i t s gr a spi ng ha nds
a nd sla shi ng t eet h.
 FRIGH TMARE
And every litt le bo y a nd girl knows t o be sca red of t he f rightma re. T hou gh t he windows and doors may be locked u p
t ight , the fr ight mar e ca n peer t hrou gh t he sma l est keyhole to see children hiding in  their beds. At  night you might  hea r
it scr at ching a t t he door  post as it tr ies t o fi nd a wa  y in, or i t might loose a hoa rs  e a nd u gly shr iek in  the dis  ta nce t hat ca n
str  pi  your skin a nd melt  your bones.
in s eve  y
r  thi n
  g yo u shoul d be a  f a
r  i
  d of  , chil d. a
L   yer 
  upon r
f  ea k i s  yer 
h la  , l
 a  l s tuf  fed i  
n to  
a  bit of 
 The f r igh tma r e con ta  e ne   
x t one b ubbl es up  to hor r if y you
  .  The  f r ig h tma  r e i s
 
f lesh a nd held b y  ttle b
br i  ones.  Peel  one c
fa  e a w  y
a  n
a  d th
n g  
mo ther ea g er  to punis h her  chi l e
dr  n, a  too thles s a n d ugly old ma  n , a   nes t full of   spi d
  s
er  , a wr  ithi ng
a scr eechi
ma ss of poisonous ser pen ts-a ll wr a pped toge ther in the sa me r o t ti ng ski n.
 SKIN
But a lso bewa r e, m y chi ld, the wa i li ng cr i es of t he
Skin & Moa ns. A cloa k st i tched t oget her  f r om t he f lesh
of t he cur sed cover s i t s gor e-slick muscles a nd i ts
 j ea lous hea r t. Bor n wi t hout a f a ce t o ca ll i t s own a nd
& M OAN S 
mos t of  a ll, stitching them into a  gor  y dr ape. Bu t its
vi ctims a re no t gi ven the gi ft of dea  th. Thei r sa llow
vi sa ges a r e lef  t to moan a nd groa n in a  thi n-voi ced
chorus a s the y f uel the crea  tur e s i nsa  ti able gr eed
’

envi ous of  wha t other s ha ve, i t st r ps i ba r e  to a dd ever  mor e to i ts 

t hose unf or t una t e enou gh t o cr oss i ts ma ca bre shroud.
 pa t h wi t h wicked, cur vi ng bla des.
Should you ever 
L ike a skilled t a nner , i t  hea r its keeni ng
select s only t he best  moa n upon the
cuts of f lesh t o midnight a ir ,
a dd t o it s blood y flee, m y child!
hi de. It  pri z es t he Flee with a ll your
f a ces of i t s pr e y strength, lest
it be your  f ace
 the Skin & Moans
wea r s.
 C RA
  B BI  T    
 ri ng,
 Be wa  re i dle f a nci es, c hi ld, f o r of a ll t he sla  ve
s ha  rp- too t hed ho r ro rs t ha  t lu rk i n t he s ha do n tws hem  to tea  r f les h f  rom bone,
no t a ll seem a s suc h w hen f  rsi   t you look upo .
 rn ed , e ve n  
 t he mo s t m
a  us i n g  c re  tu
a   re s c a n be
un  
o
f   
r tu  te
na  a
f  rm
  e  rs a n d i
f  e ld  wo rk e  rs  ve lea 
 ha  i
f  e ld s, se em i n g a l mo s t to
As ma n y   ve r se e a  sm a l li  
s h,  
pinkis h be a   
s t bo un di n g i n  
 t he
dea d  
l y da n ge  ro us .  If  yo u e  r
a  y, a n d  re me mb e  r m y  wo  rds.
ba   ck n
a  d be  w
in vi te you to join  it in  its ga mes, hold

For i f i t be a cra bbit , with ear s

t ha t f lop a nd claws tha t click, it 
will bounce a nd ga mbol a nd appear 
quite f oolish . . . but  only a fool
would let  it dr aw near . Its teeth
ar e a s sha rp a s i ts appet ite for sof t
pink f lesh, a nd it loves the taste of 
a naughty child s bones most
’

in all t he world.

  RA T T L E R
And should you st a y sa 
  f e t he li ve-lon g da  y, chi ld, listen close bef or e you slee p:  R a  t t  le, c l a t t e r ,   c l a  n k.
T he sound of  t he cha ins t ha t wr a p  the r a t t ler comes r in gi ng out  i n t he dee pest da r kness of t he ni ght    .
As wr a t h bi nds u p the hea r t s of  men, so t hi s bea st of ma ddened ha te i s dr a ped   wi t h unbr ea ka ble links. L ur ed
b y mur der a nd r a ge,
  t he r a tt ler collect s a  blood y debt a t i ts
ma st er s comma nd. Once unlea shed b y wi cked
’ 

ha nds, this crea t ur e of cha i ns a nd f ur  y

dema nds a  gr is ly t oll. Not hi ng ca n st op
i ts sla u ght er but the dea t h of every soul
a r ound, f or onl y when a ll lie dea d does
t he cr ea t ur e f a ll ba ck t o t he da rkness t o
a wa i t i t s ma st er s
’ 

next summonin g.
So swea r , m y dea r ,
t ha t f r om this da  y you
wi ll never r a ise your ha nd
in a n ger nor a llow r a ge  t o
r ule your hea r t . P r omi se me
t ha t you will be ki nd a nd tr ue t o
a ll you meet , a nd a lwa  ys hold your 
t em per a t ba  y. Should you fa lt er  a nd
la sh out wit h s pit e, you ma  y be
doomed t o hea r i n the gloom t he
a  p pr oa chi ng r a t tle of cha ins
a nd t he scr a pi  n g scr eech of 
meta lli c cla ws.
 GRYMKIN
 True grymkin first emerged out of
Urcaen long, long ago—lost souls
reshaped by the Defiers’ judgment.
 S
ince the first true grymkin came into being
ages upon ages ago, they have dwelled in
both Caen and Urcaen. They are the source of
countless folktales, legends, and nursery rhymes— 
stories created by grieving families who lost loved
ones to the mischievous and dangerous grymkin.
Some of the most legendary among them are
known by many names, and figures such as the
bewildering Twilight Sisters and the enigmatic
Lord Longfellow have haunted Caen for hundreds
or even thousands of years. They travel from place
to place to sate their never-ending desire to punish
their human playthings. The longer a grymkin has
dwelled in the world of men, the more legends will
have formed around it and the more powerful and
dangerous it becomes.
 
 r
 a    a      o u l   The first grymkin were lost souls reshaped by
 W   l  o  t
the Defiers’ passing judgment upon them. Their
powers, appetites, and even physical bodies are a
reflection of the taint upon their spiritual being,
the stain left by corrupt civilization. When the
power of the Defiers caused the grymkin to be
remade, their wicked ways sculpted their flesh to
serve as a warning and a punishment to all who
indulged in such sins. This warning is written deep
in the body and soul of every grymkin, though few
mortals who encounter them realize it. To those
 who are blind to their own corruption and sin, the
acts of the grymkin seem haphazard, random, or
simply mad. But each grymkin was molded by the
burden of iniquity on a soul, punishing a spirit
that had claimed Menoth’s gifts and used them for
 wickedness against its own kind.
 Before the Old Witch loosed the Defiers from
their prison to begin the Wicked Harvest, the
grymkin on Caen were guided only by their own
instinctive desires, shaped by the supernatural
laws by which the Defiers remade their corrupted
souls. Utterly without conscience, each grymkin
acted based on its unique appetites. They reveled
in tricking and tormenting the unwary traveler
and the greedy banker, in bringing suffering to
the glutton and the drunken lout. Random as they
seemed, each grymkin collected its toll with great
care. Usually they hunted on the fringes of society,
drawn by the simple stories people told about them.
Some still walked among the cities of Menoth’s
creation, hiding in plain sight and picking their
quarry with great discrimination.
The grymkin choose their prey and imminent
progeny based on certain sins sprouted from
corruption’s soil. The dread rots—harvesters of the
grymkin who transform their victims with a leering
pumpkin head—were born from the iniquities of
corrupt and greedy farmers of the Iron Kingdoms
 who would let their neighbors starve if they could
not afford their goods. Murder crows were once
corrupt bureaucrats, thieving from their neighbors
through the larceny of graft. Hollowmen arose D um  b   J a 
c 
H ea  d   i n a k 
from those who abandon their fellow soldiers in
M us     b es  ac   k 
 wartime, while the grotesque piggybacks were a  t a   r 
um   
greedy gluttons who grew fat on the backs of
others’ toil. The insane mad caps, drunken brewers
of the Wicked Harvest, were alcoholics whose
drunkenness and neglect caused the deaths of B ON   E 
S   
innocent victims. i  o n C R A 
P  g  CK  !  
y  o  
L oo  k   w  r   b a c 
u
ha  t     y  k 
ou   'v   
b ec   om   
e!  
  All of the grymkin are shaped by the macabre
and ironic stories that also guide them. These
tales contain secrets reflecting the nature of the
corruption that led to the grymkins’ genesis. But the
stories also have within them the means of evading
the fate of becoming a grymkin. These acts almost
always require sacrifice. For instance, a farmer
in danger of becoming a dread rot can avoid his
punishment by destroying the crops that are his
livelihood, and a glutton who faces transformation
into a piggyback can escape that fate by sacrificing
his material wealth to live as an ascetic.
For some sins, particularly those which caused
harm to numerous others, the only acceptable
sacrifice is one’s own life. Some grymkin, like the
murder crows, will allow their prey to end their own
lives to evade existence as a grymkin. When faced
 with the horrors of that fate, however, many find
it a price easy to pay. Deep and untarnished piety
to one of the gods is the only reliable way to avoid
the grymkins’ reaping—though this entails what
the Defiers would scorn as enslavement to a higher
power. When face to face with the grymkin, even
the most religious man may feel his faith quail and
crumble, for every mortal has hidden shames or
forgotten darkness.
The punishments the grymkin mete out are
broad in scope. Some are content to simply harm
or disfigure sinners for their misdeeds—lopping
off the fingers of a pickpocket or stealing the voice
of a loudmouth. Others require a more substantial
punishment and are not content until they claim the
lives of the transgressors. The first grymkin, who
punished the worst sinners, would not be content
 with something as simple as death, however, and
 would always induct a sinner into their own ranks.
The Defiers had given them the power to bring their
own kind into the flock, and so the first few grymkin
in the world of men spread, passing the reward
and curse of their timeless existence to others
throughout the centuries.
Perhaps the most horrifying of all grymkin
are the imps and gremlins. Imps of all varieties
are crafted from the weak and pitiful souls
transformed in the presence of the Defiers. Their
fate is to serve in the most mindless roles, given
over to the most basic and rote behaviors, such
as the drunken bouts of the pathetic cask imps.
Gremlins arise from souls that have committed
no sins, such as those of young children lost in
accidents caused by the drunks who are in turn
condemned to become mad caps.
 When the Old Witch unleashed the Wicked
Harvest upon Caen, the grymkin were drawn
inexorably to their freed masters. From the
corners of the world they came in countless
numbers to act as the reapers of the Wicked
Harvest, imposing their toll upon all of
humanity’s corruption and iniquity.
HOLLOWMEN &
LANTERN MAN
 As you walk the path of war, my son, be true and never stray.
Stand with your commander and your brethren in the fray.
Soldiering’s not easy; you will suffer, you will quake,
But wayward soldiers doom themselves to a harsh and dismal fate.

 When a light shines on the battlefield, a kind and welcome glow,

Beware, my cherished one, that is a way you should not go.
 A lantern may call out to you with warmth and seeming cheer,
But if you walk toward it you will lose your soul, I fear.

For there you will find waiting a baleful lantern man

 Who’ll draw you in with brightness and make you join his clan—
The men who march forever, the men who’ve lost their lives,
Pitiable souls who’ll never more see children, home, or wives.

They say he’d been an officer who led his men astray,
 Who turned them from the foe they faced, as he his oaths betrayed.
His company, good soldiers all, did nothing but comply,
 Abandoning comrades in arms—but he led them off to die.

His lantern is enticing, its glow so clear and bright.

It shines out in the deepest dark to push away the night.
But he who hoists that lamp aloft is the dust of long-dead dreams.
The lantern man makes promises whose truths aren’t what they seem.
He’ll lead you far from honor’s path and toward his fateful lie.
He’ll lure you upon a frozen lake where you are sure to die.
He’ll walk you through a blackened bog to be certain that you drown.
He’ll shine his light into your eyes as you are sinking down.

 And once you perish at his hand, a hollowman you’ll become,

Eternally in uniform and ready with your gun,
 A soldier who forevermore will fight a senseless war,
 A dusky shell of what you were, whom righteous me n abhor.

 And now the lantern man must claim all those

 who war evade,
So if you see him,
my dear boy . . .

I beg you,

turn away.
 mad caps
Stoke the fires and heat the pot
Bubble, bubble boiling hot
The sweet elixir’s almost done
To whet the whistle and please the tongue

 Ah yes, our drunken revelries

Have brought on countless miseries
But we have paid for what we’ve done
For now we’re mad caps, every one!

 Add your voice and sing along

Sing the mad caps’ brewing song
More ale will soothe you, that we vow
Drink it all, aye, drink it now!

Never mind the things we do

 Just quench your thirst—it’s all for you
You’re not afire, now don’t be daft
Take a swig and wear the cask!

Quick, go get her ’fore she’s gone

Not that way—she’s there , moron!
Plug your ears, boys, here he goes…
BOOM!
 And one more sot is meat for crows.

— Traditional brewer’s song of the Olgunholt

CASK IMPS
 MURDER
CROWS
From the journals of Bolden Peterton, Professor of Mental Maladies and
Diseases, Royal Cygnaran University

 While we may be wont to ascribe Speaking with several townsfolk, I

the outrageous claims of those learned this nervous wretch I bore
touched by madness to medical  witness to was a stark contrast to
abnormalities, we must be careful the man Oliver Sween had been
not to judge too hastily. In a world prior to whatever affliction had
 where the avatars of gods walk befallen his feverish mind. Mr.
among men, where ghosts are Sween had been a personage of
seen reveling on city streets, and distinctive bravado, a man who
 where priests perform miracles commanded respect from anyone
daily, can we really diagnose with he met. Yet in a matter of mere
any certainty which madness is  weeks he had deteriorated into
born of superstition and which is a simpering wreck. According
truly born of more sinister means? to a local aldermen, Mr. Sween’s
condition was no sickness but
Consider, for instance, the curious rather an ancient punishment
case of one Oliver Sween, tax for his abuse of his political
collector for the hamlet of Galhold appointment; this official further
on the northeast border of averred that a like retribution
 Widower’s Wood. I encountered
had claimed the life of another
Mr. Sween during a clinical round in Sween’s position, who was
of the area for my book, Mental
found dead hanging in Galhold’s
Maladies and Malfeasances. When I square with a confession of
first met him, Mr. Sween seemed
embezzlement pinned to his chest
overall in fine physical health for along with a statement that he was
his age. However, he had been ready to “join the crows.”
suffering from severe attacks of
panic and a crippling anxiousness I later learned from Mr. Sween
 while outdoors. The man could the unnatural specters that
scarcely venture twenty feet afflicted his mind were no vague,
before becoming frantic and haphazard entities; indeed, the
shouting at invisible beings he  visions that tormented him
 was convinced were stalking him,  were very specific and growing
perched on rooftops and tree more numerous by the day. He
limbs wherever he might go. described their appearance as
some grotesque cross between
man and crow. These beings
 stared down from hooked beaks  As the flock tore at him,
 with unblinking eyes, and their I discerned through the swirling
gaunt arms terminated in confusion of ink-black wings the
 wicked metal talons. At the time shapes of what appeared to be
I found his description of these men, yet I knew they were not.
shades most peculiar and, to my They had great sharp talons in
professional shame, quite absurd. place of hands, and hiding their
faces were masks with hooked
It was only days later that I beaks and empty black eyes.
discovered that what had beset These figures moved like spirits
Mr. Sween were far more than through the birds swarming
hallucinations. As dusk darkened around the town center, the
to night, I heard the unmistakable tattered cloth of their cloaks
cawing of crows outside the
remaining unnaturally still
tavern where I took my supper. despite the chaotic beating of air
The sound grew progressively
around them. I will never forget
louder, until the world was the sound of Oliver Sween’s final
drowned out by it. I rushed to
bone-rattling scream as, I can
the door to see what could be only assume, his theretofore
happening outside, but was spectral tormentors finally laid
physically arrested by the burly
their claim to him.
innkeeper. Suddenly I heard Mr.
Sween crying out from beyond in Not until dawn had broken the
the town square, soon followed by next morning did anyone dare
a panicked banging at the door. step foot outside their houses
Mr. Sween screamed, begging us and walk beneath the open sky.
to let him in. Despite my protests,  All that remained of Mr. Sween
the innkeeper would not budge,  was a pile of bloodied rags and
and the door remained barred to the macabre orbs of his eyes,
the luckless tax collector. pecked free from their sockets
and left behind. Since that day
 With no other recourse available, I have paid special heed to the
I watched from the frosted glass
more fantastical claims of the
 window to at least gain some unfortunates who have fallen
sense of what transpired. Before
under my care, and my library
my eyes, a massive murder of remains stocked with as many
crows set upon poor Oliver
books on folklore as it is with
Sween, pecking and tearing at his
books of proven medical science.
flesh as he cried out in agony.
 N  E  
I G H
S  L A Y  E
C l p, i cl o p  , cl  p,i  cl o p  , yo u he a r us
 
R  
S 
d r 
C l p i , cl o p,  cl  pi  , cl o p,   yo ur e  ye s g a w in g ne a r 
O ur l a nce s sha r p,  o ur st e e dr  so wa  rw  e i d e w i t h f e a r 
F o r m yo ur r a nk s a nd st a nd  yo u st e r e a d y 
C l p i , cl o p  , cl  pi  , cl o p  , yo u l l d i e a n a d y 
— 

'   d  w e w i l l che e r !
— NE
 I GH S 
LAY 
ER  W 
AR C 
HAN 
T 
 Twilight 
In
times gone by, a band of hi  ghwaymen
set upon a young and foolish lad as
 he journeyed to bow and scrape to his
 father’s lord. The callow fool escaped, but not
before he caught a bullet in his soft belly.
As the young man lay whimpering over his
wound in the shade of a quaking aspen tree,
two women—one a beauty, one a crone—
approached him from the wild wood. They
were the Twilight Sisters.
“You were foolish to come out here alone,”
said Heidrun, the young and beautiful
sister. “They all warned you this would
 happen, that you’d stumble upon some
 fearsome beast or wicked men and just like
that, your blood would be spilling out all over
the cold forest floor. Even those who wished
 you well knew you’d soon see your end.
“Save your dying words! I know your story
well enough. I’ve seen it a thousand times
before. But your story need not end here,
careless traveler. My sister and I have many
 gifts. We can restore you. We can heal your
wounds and reverse this felicitous fate. We
will require of you a small bargain, however,
 for our magic does not come without cost.
“I will allow you to sip from my goblet of wine,
and you will be restored to health. All I ask for
 in return is but a pound of flesh, or a limb—I
care not which. That is all. A quick chop of the
cleaver and you will be healed. A second chance
at life!
 "So, do we have a deal?”
S isters
In
times gone by, a band of highwaymen set u pon
a young and noble boy as he journeyed to the
house of his father’s lord. The youth escaped,
but not before the cruel highwaymen had shot him
in the gut.
As the young man lay dying in the shade of a
quaking aspen tree, two women—one a beauty, one
a crone—approached him from the wild wood.
They were the Twilight Sisters.

“Oh, look at you, you poor unfortunate soul,”

said Agrona, the old and ugly sister. “How
dangerous this world is. How uncaring. Here
you lie, a noble traveler just trying to get
from one place to another, now bleeding your
last upon the cold earth.

“Hush! There is no need to spend any more

of what precious life remains to you on words.
My sister and I know your story well. We can
see it in your bones and in the blood that
pours from your wound.

“But your tale does not need to end here,

poor traveler. My sister and I have many gifts.
We can restore you. We can heal your wounds
and reverse this cruel fate. All we require is
a small bargain, for our magic does not come
without cost.

“You may partake of my gruel, made of all that

slithers and croaks, and you will be well again. All I
ask for in return is a but a kiss—and that forever
after you will love only me.

“Is that not a fair exchange?”

   p   m   I  r  e   m   m  i  l   G
   ?   m  a  e  y     I
 .   m  a   I  e  r  e  h   t  u  b ,  u  o  y   t  o  p  s  o   t  e  l  b  a  e  b   t  ’  n  o   w   I  e  y  e  e  n  o  h   t  i   w   t  a  h   t  k  n  i  h   t  u  o    Y .  r  o  r  r  i   m  e  h   t  n  i  n  a   m  e  l   t   t  i  l ,  u  o  y  g  n  i  h  c   t  a   w   m  ’
  e  e  r  e  h ,  y  a  s   I   d  l  u  o  h  s  r    O

   I
  e  h     T .  r  o  r  r  i   m  e  h   t  n  i  e  r  e  h   t  e  r  ’  u  o  y  e  l  i  h   w  p  e  e  l  s   t  ’  n  a  c   I .  k  c  a  b  e   m  o  c  o   t  u  o  y  r  o   f   t  i  a   w   I  e  l  i  h   w  e  k  a   w  a  e   m  p  e  e  k  s  p  l  e    H .  u  o  y  r  o   f   t  s  u  j  e  k  o  j  e  l   t   t  i  l   t  a  h   t  e   t  o  r   w
   t .  h  g  i  s  y   m  y  a   w  a  p  o  o  c  s   d  n  a   d  i  l  e  h   t  r  e   d  n  u  n  o  o  p  s  e  l   t   t  i  l  r  u  o  y  h  s  u  p  l  l  ’  u  o  y   w  o  n  k   I  )  !   t  i  g  n  i  y  a  s  o   t   d  e  s  u   t  e  g   t  s  u   m  !  e  y  e  !  e  y  e  !  e  y  e   (  s  e  y  e  y   m  e  s  o  l  c   I   t  n  e   m  o   m
  e  v  a  h  u  o  y  e  s  u  a  c  e  b  s  e  y  e  y   m   d  e  e  n  u  o  y  o    D   ?   f  e  i  h   t  e  y  e  e  l   t   t  i  l  u  o  y ,   m  e  h   t   t  n  a   w  u  o  y  y  h   w   t  a  h   t  s   I .  n   w  o  r  u  o  y  s  a   w   t  i  e  k  i  l  e  y  e  y   m  g  n  i  r  a  e   w  u  o  y   w  a  s
   I
   ?   w  e  i  v   f  o   t  n  i  o  p  h  s  e  r   f  a   m  o  r   f   d  l  r  o   w  e  h   t   t  a  k  o  o  l  o   t   t  n  a    W   ?  n   w  o  r  u  o  y   f  o  e  n  o  n

  e  h   t  g  n  i  r  b  n  o  i   t  c  e  l   f  e  r  r  u  o  y   w  a   S   t .  h  g  i   t  p  u   d  e  k  c  o  l   t  s  u  j  y   d  o  b  e  l  o  h   w  y   m   d  n  a ,  e  c  a   f  l  u   f  i   t  u  a  e  b  y   m  g  n  i  r  i   m   d  a  s  a   w   I  n  e  h   w  e  r  e  h   t  u  o  y   w  a   S .   w  o  n  k    I
   I ,  e  n  o   t  s  r  i   f  e  h   t   t  o  g  u  o  y   w  o  h  s  ’   t  a  h     T .  e  y  e  y   m   f  o  r  e  n  r  o  c  e  h   t   f  o   t  u  o  u  o  y  h  c   t  a  c  o   t  e  v  a    H .  r  o  r  r  i   m  e  h   t  n  i  y  l   t  c  e  r  i   d  e  z  a  g  o   t   t  o  n  l  u   f  e  r  a  c  e  b   t  s  u   m
   ?   I   d  i   d ,  r  e   t   f  a  e   d  i  s   t  a  h   t   f  o   t  u  o  e  r  o   m  h  c  u   m  e  e  s   t  ’  n   d  i    D .  e  r  i  s  e   d  u  o  y   t  a  h   w  p  u  p  o  o  c  s   d  n  a  n   w  o   d  n  o  o  p  s
  h  c   t  a  p  e  n    O   ?  o   w    t  e   m  e  v  a  e  l  u  o  y  l  l  i   w ,  e  y  e  r  e  h   t  o  e  h   t  e  k  a   t  u  o  y   f   I   ?   t  i  s  i ,  e   m  r  o   f  h  c   t  a  p  e  y  e  n   A .  n   w  o  r  u  o  y   f  o  e  k  o  j  e  l   t   t  i  l  a     —
  k  o  o  l  e   m  s  e  k  a   m   t  i  y  a  s  n  e  v  e   t  h  g  i    M   t .  i  e  k  i  l  n  e  v  e   t  h  g  i   m  s  e  i   d  a  l  e   m  o   S .  e  y  e  y   m  r  e  v  o  h  c   t  a  p  a  h   t  i   w  n  a   m  e   m  o  s   d  n  a  h  a  e  b  l  l  i   t  s  n  a  c   I .  e   m   d  e  n  i  u  r   t  ’  n  s  a  h
   !  e  y   a   -
   I
   t   f  i  g  r  u  o  y   d  e  c  i   t  o  n
  y  .  e   t  a  r  i  p  g  n  i  r  a   d  a  e  k  i  l
  e    A
   d  o  o  g  s  a   t  s  o   m  l  a  s  i  l  l  i  u  q   A .  n  e  h   t ,  r  e  s  o  l  c  e   m  o    C   ?  e  s  n  e  p   x  e  y   m   t  a  r  e   t  h  g  u  a  l  r  u  o  y  n  i  a   t  n  o  c   t  ’  n  a    C .   m  o  o  r  e  h   t  n  i  u  o  y  r  a  e  h   I .  p   m  i  e  l   t   t  i  l ,  u  o  y  r  a  e  h  n  a  c
   d  e  v  o  h  s  n  e  p  y   m  e  k  i  l  u  o  y   w  o  h  e  e  s   d  n  a ,  p   m  i  r  e   m   m  i  l  g  e  l   t   t  i  l ,  e   m  n  o  p  u  g  n  i  p  e  e  r  c  p  e  e    K .  r  o  r  r  i   m  e  h   t  n  i  e  r  e  h   t  u  o  y   f  o  r  e   m   m  i  l  g  a  e  e  s  n  a  c   I .  e   f  i  n  k  a  s  a    I
   d  l  u  o  h  s  e  y  e  r  e  h   t  o  r  u  o  y  e  r  e  h   w
WITCHWOOD
Gaze not upon the Witchwood, child.
Do not accept her gift.
The ripe, red fruit is but a lure
to draw you to her swift.
Look to the tree behind her,
such an old and angry thing.
Its bark is like an old man’s scowl,
and it bears a hempen ring.

 Within that knotted necklace, child,

a witch did dance her last.
Encircling her charming throat,
it closed her life up fast.
But not every witch that’s put to death
 will stay forever dead.
Her soul, if innocent, may become
tangled in rooted threads.

 And she may rise again to tempt

those who caused her death,
 Whispering to them stories
 with a soft, alluring breath.
Telling tales of friends’ betrayals,
she beckons: come near, come near!
So the tree can rend their bodies
and drink the liquor of their fear.
 R
 
TR AP 
 E
P R
 
ER I
K N
 Its claws can rend a moonlit stone, its teeth can slice through steel and bone
 And any
 And  any c hild wh
whose so
s oul it c laims s
aims shall
hall never
never se
see the s
the sun
un again.
again.
But if thine heart be free of sin, why should ye fear the trapperkin? 
For only those with evil’s brand are taken by its grasping hand.
 —Morridane folk rhyme

e c o m e  he
 h
t e  bited
 ha bi
quietest in ha
 horn woo d F o r e st  ha
 ha s  be
 b
 let of C
 ham le  bo lg
f Czer bo  he T ho
 lge in t he  ld in
 hi ld
 ver y c hi
 T hee ha
 T h e, p e  ha
 h
r a p s i n a  l l of C
 l  ygnar. E ve
f C yg
 xpanse of t  hat
f t ha  wi
 w  ld
 
i ld p la
 la c
 vi l l la
 vi  he great e xp
 lage in t he
Czerbolge is gone. This did not happen all at once, but night after night they vanished.
Each morning, more mothers and fathers would discover crude wooden figures tucked in
beds w here th
 their sons and daughter ters had be
 been sung to
 to sl
 sleep.
ep. It to
 took but tw 
 tw o months
ths to
 to
erase a ge
 generatio
ationn f rom th
 that v ill
illage.
The hollow-eyed villagers
blamed the disappearances on

“trapperkin,”

small fiends drawn

from local myth.

T hese imps are said to

s q 
q u a  open impossible d
oor s, door s
f   l  e  s  l  i  d  l  a  t hat s ho u  ul l  d 
h 
h b  i  r  w      no t 
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t  ,  l e 
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S  t  o  f    h 
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s m  w  a  y   b  e  s  k  
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t  o 
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a  
l  c  .  p  e 
z e e r  i t t.  Y   a c h  o 
om    o n 
rb  bo  o  l l  g  e t t t h  h  
i  l  d   m  u n  t  
h e  i  
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t   r  
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s t 
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ri i   c 
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t y 
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s n o  o t  h   , a s 
k  e 
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n b  y a  f  t 
th   e 
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v   e  r w  
wi     s  u n l  
h o o r  e i i r 
r  l  o 
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d i  k e 
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r   o 
or  r   n o  a 
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d t h  h 
h  
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l  l  i n  h 
h  
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b  y w hi  ve 
e   s 
s   t  he     i i r 
e n g  i  n a 
s 
s p 
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s   o f   h 
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f  g  gr  r y 
  mk i in a 
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s ;   i t 
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m a 
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t he ni g  w  
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wn    e r 
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(Exce
(Excerpt
rpt from Czerbolge: The Town witho
Town without Child)
ut a Child)
 Lord Longfellow
“Lord Longfellow’s Masquerade” from Tales of the Grym
There once was a young and handsome baron who lived
in unmatched luxury. His lands were fertile, his family
rich, and his household blessed with an abundance of
good fortune. He dwelled in a sweeping estate and loved
to host grand masquerades and galas to entertain his
highborn friends.
One year there was a great drought. The fields dried up
to dust, and the baron’s peasants began to starve. The
baron could easily have sold some of his finery to buy
food for his desperate people, or opened his storehouses
to give them a portion of what he kept, but he selfishly
 waved off their plight.
“The peasants are fat from many years of plenty,” he said.
“And my friends have come to expect my hospitality.” So
the commoners continued to suffer.
One night, when the moons hung bright overhead like
dewdrops in a spider’s web and the peasant children
cried in their beds with aching, empty stomachs, the
baron hosted yet another great masquerade, more grand
than any before, to mark the coming of his twentieth
birthday.
Lords and ladies from all around were in attendance,
but none was commented on as much as the mysterious
Lord Longfellow. Wearing a porcelain mask, a stylish hat,
and a broad coat of fine silk, he was the very picture of a
dashing rogue.
“Who is this,” the baron wondered. “I do not remember
inviting a Lord Longfellow.” So when his cheeks were
hot from too much wine, he approached the mysterious
gentleman and demanded to know his full identity.
The answer came as a dry and dusty whisper, like dead leaves
scraping on an old coffin lid: “I am Longfellow, the hungry
lord of the shadows. I am the patient master of the web.”
The drunken baron’s guts turned to water at the sound
of the voice behind the mask, but he could not show his
fear. He demanded to see Longfellow’s invitation.
“I am invited by the weeping of the mothers and by the
cries of their children,” was the rasping reply. “You have
neglected your duty to those who depend most upon you.”
“You insult me in my home!” the baron cried.
“I make no apology for it,” the visitor said calmly. “You
are a venal and useless man who has squandered his gifts
and let others suffer for his vanity. Noblemen are the
 worst of all, for they hold themselves above all others.”
Furious, the young baron challenged Lord Longfellow
to a duel. The other guests clapped and walked to the
gardens to watch the duel, but as they walked Longfellow
pulled the baron aside and lifted his mask to reveal
himself. His eight eyes glittered in the torchlight as his
six twitching limbs played along the grips of fine pistols.
“I am Lord Longfellow, and I’ve come to collect my toll.
No living man has defeated me. If I gun you down, then
my business is done and all the rest can go. Deny me this,
however, and all the noble blood here will be spilled, but
I will leave you be for the rest of your days. What say you,
baron?”
The baron gulped, then looked at all the plump and
powdered faces of his gathered friends. Truth be told,
he thought, their company was not that pleasurable,
their conversation tedious and dull. To give his own life
for theirs seemed not at all fair to him, and after a brief
pause he gave his answer.
Longfellow threw off his broad coat and tossed his mask
aside. His gleaming pistols filled the air with fire and
death, and in moments all the lords and ladies lay in pools
of spreading crimson. Then Lord Longfellow was gone.
 When the sun rose and the peasants saw what the
baron had done in the night, they hauled him off as
a murderer. His trial was swift and his punishment
harsh. When the sun next rose, he was standing on the
gallows, ready to swing from a rope like a spider from
a silken thread. But before the trap door fell, the baron
saw in the crowd a lord wea ring a silken cloak and a
mask of porcelain. The roguish figure tipped his cap as
the young baron fell . . .
a  w   
a  
 y   
Lady Karianna Rose
Once, when I was young, I lived by the sea with my daughter, my sons, and my
husband. There each morning I kissed my husband’s brow and the cheeks of my children,
for I loved each of them so much that my love was ink in water that bloomed over the pot
to splash on the page of each day. Their prosperity was the whole of my heart.

Had it been possible, I would have stopped the clock each second I was with them to
prolong my bliss and elude the unknowable fortunes of the future. But I was too happy
and they were too perfect, and so our blessed life caught the milky eye of cruel Fate.
 Wicked and jealous Fate could not abide our happiness: with a great fire fueled by its
 withered black heart, it stifled the laughter and joy of our perfect home.

The flames melted gold, shriveled roses, cracked slabs of fine marble, though I cared
not about these things. My heart shattered for my beautiful little family, trapped within
and beyond my reach, and the screams I loosed as I threw myself at the fire would not
blow it out. All I held dear turned to ash on the wind and blew out to sea. I was left with
no husband, no children, no home.

My aunts and uncles took me in, blubbering their condolences. At first they were
concerned and caring, but soon they could not hide their consternation at my grief. They
passed me from house to house, their stunted hearts unable to comprehend how perfect
my children had been or what it meant to suffer loss such as mine. I wailed and shook
and clawed at their jiggling throats to rip out the half-hearted pities, clawed at my ears to
dig out their worthless words.

In time they all tired of me and sent me from their sight, far from their hearths
 where I might be forgotten. Alone I drifted, my chilled heart empty, and I felt less than
nothing as, finally, keys turned to lock me away, no longer an inconvenience to the
 world. I might have died in that place, so pure and crushing was my despair.

It was then, in my cold and lonely prison, that an old woman came to my side and
offered the respite I so desperately required. In place of what I had lost, she offered a
new purpose to fill the void in the pit of me. She gave me new children to whom I could
attend. They came to me then, the little lost ones, and I claimed them as a mother, and
in exchange for their love offered my own devotion. For each child taken from me, I was
rewarded with a hundred more, and even now they gather, for I am their solace in this
 world that cares for them not.

They are so beautiful, my children, their laughter so magical, their tricks so very
clever. They adore listening to my songs, and we play such games together as I never
thought I would play again. Watch them now, dear. They have such a delightful game in
store for you.

Patient Transcript 1335, Septen 7, 609 AR.

As recorded by Dr. Alcott (found dead Septen 9, 609 AR).
 Death Knell
I remember the day clearly, the drab overcast and the steady rain. A bank of thick evening fog settled
about the hills and crept into town on a slow breeze to caress the glass of shop windows and swirl over
cobblestone streets. I was standing in the tavern doorway with ale in hand when I first heard the ringing
of the death knell.

It creaked down the main road, a rotting memory of aging wood. Taxed by its towering load, a knock-
kneed nag pulled the well-laden cart down the pitted street, threatening to topple its cargo at our
doorstep. It hauled not just corpses, but coffins too, moldering and freshly pried from the earth. Feet
propped upon the footboard, the hunched driver seemed a robber baron of the dead.
 A strange little man, he rode with his hat pulled low and his slender knees pulled close, and it was his
hand that held the slender pole from which hung the ornate bell. The bell tolled as the jostling cart crept
down our thoroughfare. It rang out through the fog and encroaching dark, louder and clearer than a
church bell, and I felt it in my bones. My body went cold as the cart passed me by, and the flowers upon
the sills withered and died.

 Ahead of the teetering cart ambled a throng of little beasts with pointed ears and tiny claws, playing lively
music for the dead. They made faces and danced jigs and offered foul gestures to mock the crowd that had
gathered. My neighbors laughed at these little ones, and a good few followed the procession onward as it
guided them to the end of town and beyond . . . never to return.

For my part, a lump had grown in my throat, and I remained silent as the grave. My gran always told me
not to laugh when the corpse cart rolls by, nor to speak, nor even to mutter or breathe, for the hunched
driver upon his coach keeps his eye out for those living who might soon join the dead.
 GREMLIN SWARM
MINION GRYMKIN SOLO

Nothing in all the world attracts the attention of gremlins like the hiss and clank of
GREMLIN SWARM
SPD STR MAT RAT DEF ARM CMD
a warjack treading across the battleeld. Mischievous and malicious to the extreme,
6 2 2 2 13 12 1 these grymkin delight in rooting around in mechanikal constructs with the intent of
causing as much damage as possible solely for their own amusement. More than one
DAMAGE: 5
’jack marshal has found his or her warjack inert or walking in loose circles only to
PC FA
BASE: LARGE
nd a swarm of gremlins had taken up residence within the machine.
3 2
The annoyance caused by gremlins is matched only by the sense of mystery
MINION – This model will work for Ci rcle, Legion,
Skorne, and Trollbloods. surrounding them. As with other grymkin, extraordinary zoologists know little
GREMLIN SWARM of their origins and can make even less of their motivations. Rather than allowing
INCORPOREAL
themselves to be hired for use during conicts, gremlins are far more likely to simply
STEALTH
ANNOYANCE – Living enemy models within 1˝ of this show up at battles that include large numbers of warjacks or other mechanized
model suffer –1 to attack rolls. weaponry. Rumor has it that during Ord’s Second Expansion War, a gremlin swarm
APPARITION – During your Control Phase, place this
model anywhere completely within 2˝ of its current tearing into the systems of ’jacks on both sides of a river skirmish brought the entire
location.  battle screeching to a halt.
MAN-SIZED – This model is treated as a small-based
model and occupies the space from the bottom of its Gremlins are elusive by nature and are capable of vanishing into thin air at a
 base to a height of 1.75 ˝.
MISCHIEF – When an enemy warjack or battle engine moment’s notice. Even should an army discover an infestation, removing these
 begins its activation B2B with this model, roll a d3. On tricksters from the machinery they inhabit can be nearly impossible. The only reliable
a roll of 1, the warjack or battle engine suffers –2 SPD
that activation. On a 2, it suffers –2 to attack rolls that deterrent for gremlins to date is the presence of cats, which can see through their
activation. On a 3, it suffers –2 to damage rolls that
activation.
invisibility and have a natural inclination to hunt them. It is for this reason that many
SABOTAGE (HACTION) – Target enemy warjack or battle mechaniks often keep cats within their ’jack shops and foundries. As the number of
engine B2B with this model suffers d3 + 3 damage
points and cannot have damage removed from it for
gremlin sightings continues to rise and the nations of the Iron Kingdoms produce
one round. When damaging a warjack, choose which more impressive and complex warjack technology, mechaniks serving in the eld
column suffers the damage.
may well begin adopting the same habit.

110
 Games of
 the Wicked
Some certain rules at least
there must be among even such
lawless creatures as these.
RULES &
SCENARIOS
The time of the grymkin being no more than stories and superstitions has passed.
Thanks to the machinations of the Old Witch in freeing the Defiers from Urcaen,
the true and terrifying might of the grymkin is poised to sweep through the Iron
Kingdoms like a scythe through tender wheat. At the forefront of their unnatural
army, the Defiers unleash their long-smoldering rage upon a world made rotten by
the foul and corrupting gifts of Menoth.

On the following pages you will find new rules for the Defier warlocks, two new
Grymkin theme forces, and new rules for adding special terrain thematically linked
to each of the Defiers, plus several exciting narrative scenarios that allow players to
bring the cataclysmic dawning of the Wicked Harvest to their own tabletop.

The section begins with rules on how to use the unique mystical powers of the
Defiers known as Arcana. The Arcana rules are followed by two all-new Grymkin
theme forces—Dark Menagerie and Bump in the Night—which allow you to play an
army themed around how the Defiers lead a horde of Grymkin to war, whether as a
force of destruction aimed at a single cause or as a gamboling throng of misshapen
creatures set on punishment.

Next, the State of War section provides rules for including special thematic terrain
linked to each of the five Defiers in your games so you can truly experience the
horrors of battling these malevolent demi-gods who bend reality to their whims.

Finally, five new scenarios allow players to fully experience the strange and
dangerous world of the Wicked Harvest. The first, “Grymkin in the Fog,” is a four-
player scenario that tempts unscrupulous commanders with the ability to exploit
a mysterious fog from which the grymkin are emerging—but beware, for when
dealing with grymkin, nothing comes without a price. “Harvest the Wicked” is a
non-standard scenario that puts players in control of either a small group of grymkin
or a handful of tarnished souls who find their forest camp beset in the dark of the
night. Will the grymkin reap their harvest, or can the wicked escape their fate…for
one more night, at least? Rounding out the selection is “Baron’s Balance Due,” a
linked campaign of three scenarios that showcases a typical grymkin approach to
reaping their Wicked Harvest. Beginning with the grymkin’s initial secret attack
on a corrupt baron’s manor, the campaign moves to the grymkin’s assault on the
manor grounds and culminates in their attempt to reap the wicked baron and all
 who aid him.

It’s time to muster your troops and march forth to battle, but know this: warfare
 will never again be the same now that the grymkin are afoot!
Grymkin Rules: Arcana There are two types of Arcana cards: regular Arcana cards and Trump
cards. Each Grymkin warlock has one Trump card that can be assigned
The Defiers are beings like no others, striding the line between mortal
only to that warlock. The remaining Arcana cards can be assigned to
and divine. They can make nightmares tangible and bend reality to
any Grymkin warlock.
reflect their twisted dreams. Yet there are constraints that regulate
 when the Defiers can inflict their supernatural judgments upon the Before either player’s deployment at the start of the game, a Grymkin
sinners they confront. A Defier’s highest powers may seem capricious, player assigns each of his warlocks three Arcana cards and reveals those
but each is governed by unspoken and shifting rules which only they cards to the opponent. One of these three cards must be the warlock’s
can fully understand. Trump card. The other two cards can be any non-Trump Arcana cards,
but each card can only be assigned to a single warlock in the army once.
Instead of feats, Grymkin warlocks have Arcana cards. Arcana cards
In other words, no duplicate Arcana cards are allo wed within an army.
can be played at any time during a game in accordance with the rules
on the cards. Each of a warlock’s Arcana cards can be played only once
per game. A warlock can play only one Arcana card per turn.
 GRYMKIN THEME FORCE

 DARK MENAGERIE
Each of the Deers has some special preference for how to unmake Menoth’s twisted civilization. When the
opportunity to strike arises, a Deer gathers a dark menagerie of his or her worst nightmares in a terrifying
show of force. Towering beasts of twisted esh and bounding swarms of frightful creatures gather together
to enact the Deer’s will, leaving behind only a handful of demented survivors to spread word of the host
of shadows that emerged from the night.

ARMY COMPOSITION
An army made using this theme force can include only the following Grymkin models:

• Grymkin warlocks • Glimmer Imp solos

• Non-character warbeasts • Gremlin Swarm solos
• Dread Rot units • Lady Karianna Rose
• Twilight Sisters • Death Knell battle engines

SPECIAL RULES

• Gremlin Swarm solos in this army become FA 4.

• For every full 15 points of warbeasts in this army, you can add one Crabbit lesser warbeast or
Gremlin Swarm solo to the army free of cost. Free Crabbits do not count toward the total point
value of warbeasts in the army when calculating this bonus.
• Gremlin Swarm solos in this army gain Serenity. (At the beginning of your Control Phase,
 before leeching, you can remove 1 fury point from a friendly Faction warbeast within 1 ˝ of a
model with Serenity.)
• Each non-trooper model in this army that can gain corpse tokens begins the game with one
corpse token.
 GRYMKIN THEME FORCE

 BUMP IN THE NIGHT

The grymkin are not an organized military force. They do not come to battle in regimented formations;
indeed, they attack with scarcely any perceivable order at all. When a mass of motley grymkin lumber to war
in the service of their masters, they advance as a haphazard but terrifying horde. Descending upon a vice-
ridden population, they indulge in their unique appetites as they demand their due of wicked humanity.

ARMY COMPOSITION
An army made using this theme force can include only the following Grymkin models:

• Grymkin warlocks • Lord Longfellow

• Non-character warbeasts • Trapperkin solos
• Grymkin units • Witchwood solos
• Cask Imp solos • Death Knell battle engines
• Glimmer Imp solos

SPECIAL RULES

• For every full 20 points of units or battle engines in this army, you can add one command
attachment or solo to the army free of cost. Free command attachments do not count toward the
total point value of units in the army when calculating this bonus.
• Warrior models in this army gain Rise. (If a model with Rise is knocked down at the beginning
of your Maintenance Phase, it stands up.)
• Murder Crow units in this army gain Ambush. If you choose not to deploy a unit at the start of
the game, you must still choose its prey as normal after deployment but before the rst player’s
turn. (You can choose not to deploy a unit with Ambush at the start of the game. If it is not
deployed normally, you can put it into play at the end of any of your Control Phases after your
rst turn. When you do, choose any table edge except the back of your opponent’s deployment
zone. Place the unit with Ambush completely within 3 ˝ of the chosen table edge.)
State of War: Defiers
 As beings of immeasurable power, the very presence of the
Defiers causes the landscape to twist and shift to conform to
their unconscious will. Once idle forests become infested with
mischievous grymkin or awaken as silent predators, reality
itself shifts and warps to create swirling portals of dreamstuff,
and mysterious fogs seep up from the soil to warp minds and
reveal the wickedness hiding within.

For those brave—or foolish—enough to confront such

challenges, the terrain charts in this section provide a variety
of highly thematic terrain options to use in any game of
 WARMACHINE and HORDES that includes one of the Defier
 warlocks. The scenarios found on pages 121–127  indicate the
exact quantity of thematic terrain to use for each scenario.
 When not using one of these scenarios, discuss with your
opponent how many pieces of thematic terrain you wish to add
to your table.

Each set of thematic terrain is associated with a Grymkin

 warlock, specifically one of the five Defiers. For each of these
 warlocks being used in the game, roll on that warlock’s terrain
chart. If no Defiers are being used in the game, all players
should agree on which chart to use.

 After all terrain has been set up and both players have
determined their army lists but before the starting roll to
determine the first player, players can begin replacing terrain
pieces with thematic terrain. Randomly determine one player
to begin the terrain replacement process. That player chooses
any piece of terrain on the table, excluding any piece that was
added using these charts. The other player then rolls on the
chart and replaces the terrain with the thematic terrain piece
in such a manner that the majority of the new terrain piece’s
area covers the area of the replaced piece. The second opponent
chooses the next terrain piece to be replaced, and the original
player rolls on the chart. This process continues until the agreed
upon number of terrain pieces have been replaced.
 FOUR-PLAYER SCENARIO

GRYMKIN IN THE FOG 

  TWO-PLAYER SCENARIO

HARVEST THE WICKED

SCENARIO CAMPAIGN:
BARON’S BALANCE DUE
 CAMPAIGN SCENARIO 1

SKIRMISH WITH THE TOWN GUARDS

 CAMPAIGN SCENARIO 2

BREAKING & ENTERING 

 CAMPAIGN SCENARIO 3

 THE BARON REVEALED!

THE BARON

THE BARON
ABUSE OF POWER – While in this model’s command range, friendly
Faction models gain Countercharge. (When an enemy model
advances and ends its movement within 6  of a model with ˝

Countercharge and in its LOS, the model with Countercharge can

immediately charge it. A model can use Countercharge only once per
round and not while engaged.)
HIT THE DECK! – This model cannot be hit by AOEs. If it would be hit
 by an AOE, it instead becomes knocked down. While this model is
knocked down, ranged attacks targeting it automatically miss.
SUCKER! – If this model is directly hit by an enemy ranged attack,
choose a friendly non-incorporeal warrior model within 3  of it to ˝

 be directly hit instead. That model is automatically hit and suffers all
damage and effects.
VETERAN LEADER [FRIENDLY MODELS] – While in this model’s
command range, friendly models gain +1 to attack rolls.

THE BARON 2017 v1

TARNISHED SOUL SOLO

THE BARON
SPD STR MAT RAT DEF ARM CMD
5 5 6 5 13 14 5

HAND CANNON
  RNG ROF AOE POW
12 1 — 12

Illus. by Josh Newton © Privateer Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

All faction names, logos, warjack ®,  warcaster ®  & warbeast  are TM of Privateer Press, Inc. CEREMONIAL SWORD
RNG POW P+S
0.5 4 9

DAMAGE

PC FA
0 C
THE HERETIC THE KING OF NOTHING
 Warlock   Warlock 

THE CHILD
 Warlock 

SKIN & MOANS

Heavy Warbeast

CAGE RAGER
Heavy Warbeast
 CRABBITS
Lesser Warbeasts

RATTLER
Light Warbeast

GOREHOUND
Light Warbeast

DREAD ROTS
Unit
 HOLLOWMEN
& LANTERN MAN
Unit & Command
 Attachment

And he rang an iron dinner bell that pealed across the land. To its summons came
 great hordes of squealin g piggybacks eager for the fight.

PIGGYBACKS
Unit
 CASK IMPS
GLIMMER IMP LORD LONGFELLOW Solos
Solo Solo

And with them he wandered back to stand among the rest  —

a growing mob of strangest sort, of unlikely and impossible things.

WITCHWOOD
Solo

DEATH KNELL
Battle Engine

A wicked crew for a wicked job,

which reaping now shall bring!
  PAINTING
 YOUR ARMY
 As a hobby miniatures game deeply rooted in lore and  While all are part of the Wicked Harvest, they follow the
character, HORDES offers hundreds of distinctive and highly commands of one of the five Defiers—or of the Old Witch of
detailed models designed for maximum modeling and painting Khador herself, Zevanna Agha. Thus, each host of grymkin can
enjoyment. Each model is a canvas on which to unleash your have an individual look drawn from the whims and fantasies
own creativity and imagination. You can try your hand at of the Defier who leads them. Possibilities include the ghostly
emulating the P3 Studio scheme, or dive deeper into the Iron glowing greens of the Dreamer’s Nightmare, with grymkin who
Kingdoms setting with an alternate paint scheme drawn from serve the Dreamer during one of her restless dreams of Urcaen;
the lore and background of your Faction. Or, throw convention the Heretic’s Host, which blazes with a blinding radiance to
to the wind and create your own completely original scheme. reflect his glory; and the cold, drab, ashen colors of the King
 Whatever your choice, few things are as rewarding as bringing of Nothing’s Bitter Pack. By combining ideas from the setting,
your army to life with your brush and some paints. the studio scheme, and the real world, you can create a unique
look for your army that still feels right at home in the Iron
 When painting an army, as in life, the fun truly lies in the
Kingdoms.
 journey. And like every journey, the road to a fully painted
force begins with a crucial first step—in this case, deciding how Finally, for those who really want to flex their creative
you want your army to look! muscles, we present a radically different paint scheme drawn
straight from the imagination of one decidedly imaginative
 The following pages contain color guides and quick tips to
 painter, followed by some great examples of wild invention to
inspire you in your Grymkin painting adventure. We begin
inspire your own unique creations. Choosing a more original
with models painted using our Wicked Harvest studio scheme,
or whimsical approach aligns well with the Wicked Harvest’s
which is also featured in the model gallery on pages 128-131.
aesthetic and can result in a truly eye-catching army, although
 This scheme is a great foundation to draw from with its
such schemes rely on careful planning and a willingness to
desaturated natural tones offset by vibrant colors to evoke
experiment to create a balanced yet visually striking effect.
harvest-like reds and oranges.
Regardless of which direction you decide to take in painting
Next, we present two alternative approaches to painting your
your own Grymkin force, we hope this guide provides a helpful
Grymkin models. The Wicked Harvest comprises a motley
spark of inspiration as you sit down with brush in hand to
assortment of tricksters, folklore horrors, and living nightmares.
create an army as individual as you are!

133
  STUDIO
 PAINT SCHEME
SKIN & MOANS

Eyes Dark Skins

BASE :
 Carnal Pink   Idrian Flesh
BASE :

SHADE : Piggy Purple Ink  SHADE:  Umbral Umber 

HIGHLIGHT : Murderous Magenta HIGHLIGHT : Khardic Flesh

Teeth & Knives

BASE :
 ’Jack Bone
Blood SHADE: Bastion Grey

BASE :
 Umbral Umber  HIGHLIGHT : Menoth

HIGHLIGHT : Skorne Red  White Highlight

Wraps
BASE :
 Midlund Flesh Flesh
SHADE :  Kossite Flesh Wash
BASE :
 Skorne Red
HIGHLIGHT :  Ryn Flesh
SHADE : Umbral Umber 
HIGHLIGHT :  Menoth
Stitches  White Highlight
BASE :
 Thamar Black 
SHADE:  Greatcoat Grey
HIGHLIGHT : Trollblood Highlight

Painter's Inspiration
Painting a Grymkin force is a challenging but rewarding experience.
 With a diverse selection of models ranging from the macabre to the
whimsical, finding a singular element to tie your force together can
 pose some tough questions. For the studio scheme, we chose to focus
on the eerie purple glow that distinguishes the unusual magic source of
the Grymkin, along with a desaturated color palette to contrast with
the other Factions of HORDES. In addition, a touch of bright color on
models creates a contrast across the Faction, such as the forbidden
bright-red apples of the Witchwood and the blazing orange tongue of
the Gorehound. When all of these elements are in place, you will have a
visually interesting and cohesive army for the tabletop.
For more examples of Grymkin models with studio paint schemes, see
the gallery on pages 128-131 or go to privateerpress.com.

134
  STUDIO
 PAINT SCHEME Pumpkin
Vines DREAD ROT
 Bogrin Brown
BASE :
 Bog Moss
BASE :
SHADE:  Umbral Umber 
SHADE:  Battledress Green
HIGHLIGHT :  Meaty Ochre
HIGHLIGHT :  Ordic Olive

Eyes & Mouth

Sack  Carnal Pink 
BASE :

SHADE :  Piggy Purple Ink 

 ’Jack Bone
BASE :
HIGHLIGHT :  Murderous Magenta
SHADE:  Bastion Grey
HIGHLIGHT :  Menoth White Base
Metal
 Pig Iron
BASE :

Leather SHADE :  Armor Wash

HIGHLIGHT :  Cold Steel

 Bootstrap Leather 
BASE :

SHADE: Brown Ink 
HIGHLIGHT:  Beast Hide
Overalls
 Gravedigger Denim
BASE :
Cloth SHADE :  Exile Blue

 ’Jack Bone
BASE : HIGHLIGHT :  Underbelly Blue

SHADE :  Bastion Grey

HIGHLIGHT :  Menoth White Highlight

 T I P S
 P A I N T I N G  G  
ry i  w ti h a fe w
 m k  n
l  w  o f  
 th e
 t he p urp le g  o rea  w t i h  Me n o t h
 Y o u ca n crea te  rt  b y  base c oa ti n g  t he a  t h n i  ned -d o w n
 s te p  s .  
S ta a  w a  
sh  o f
si mp le  Ne x t , app l y  ce n ter of t he g  o l  w w ti h
 H  g
i   h   g
li    
h  
t .
 W h te i i  h li g h t t he
 n ta . H g
 ,
 g y  P urp le I n k 
rd e  
r o u s  M  
a ge are a  w i 
 t h  Pi g
 M u l  , g laz e t he deepe st re cesse s.
  na  l  P  n
i    .
k   F n i a  l y
 C a r
 c   n
o  ce n tra te  n i e
 t h
l  w n
a  l o i  g  t
i  t  o

135
 "THE DREAMER'S NIGHTMARE"
 PAINT SCHEME
SKIN & MOANS
Skin
Eyes  Ryn Flesh
BASE :

SHADE:  Battlefield Brown

 Menoth White Highlight
BASE :

SHADE: Bastion Grey

HIGHLIGHT:  Morrow White

Blood or Rust
BASE :  Umbral Umber 
HIGHLIGHT : Skorne Red
Knives
Dark Skin  ’Jack Bone
BASE :

SHADE: Greatcoat Grey
 Idrian Flesh
BASE : HIGHLIGHT:  Menoth White
SHADE : Battlefield Brown Highlight
HIGHLIGHT :  Khardic Flesh

Sickly Flesh
Stitches  Meredius Blue
BASE :

SHADE: Turquoise Ink 
 Thamar Black 
BASE :
HIGHLIGHT:  Morrow White
SHADE: Bastion Grey

HIGHLIGHT:  ’Jack Bone

Painter's Inspiration
No Defier has such uninhibited influence over the physical world as the
Dreamer. In her surreal trance, reality warps moment to moment as
she passes through vertiginous stages of shifting lucidity. Perhaps most
terrifying is when the Dreamer moves from the gentler phantasms of her
dreams to the trembling darkness of her nightmares. Her whole host of
grymkin is remade into even more ghastly and terrifying forms, glowing
with the spectral greens and whites of the landscape she inhabited
during her half-remembered imprisonment in Urcaen. Light flesh tones
and desaturated colors contrast sharply with the hellish green of the
dream creatures made real, giving the army the feel of having wrapped
themselves in the skins of those who oppose their master’s vengeance. The
blood-spattered bone weapons further help to create a force terrifying
to behold on the battlefield.

136
 "THE DREAMER'S NIGHTMARE"
 PAINT SCHEME
DREAD ROT Pumpkin
Vines
 Meredius Blue
BASE :
 Iosan Green
BASE :
SHADE :  Turquoise Ink 
SHADE: Green Ink 
HIGHLIGHT :  Morrow White
HIGHLIGHT:  Necrotite Green

Eyes & Mouth

Sack  Menoth White Highlight
BASE :

SHADE : Bastion Grey

 Hammerfall Khaki
BASE :
HIGHLIGHT : Morrow White
SHADE : Gun Corps Brown
HIGHLIGHT :  ’Jack Bone
Metal
 Pig Iron
BASE :

SHADE: Greatcoat Grey
Leather HIGHLIGHT:  Cold Steel

BASE : Bootstrap Leather 

SHADE :  Battlefield Brown Overalls
HIGHLIGHT :  Gun Corps Brown
 Cygnar Blue Base
BASE :

SHADE :  Exile Blue

HIGHLIGHT :  Trollblood Highlight

Pants
 Cryx Bane Highlight
BASE :
Cloth
SHADE:  Bastion Grey  ’Jack Bone
BASE :

SHADE:  Battlefield Brown SHADE:  Greatcoat Grey

HIGHLIGHT :  Menoth White

Highlight

 
 I  T
N  
 I  G  T I P S
N  p l e
 PA  e d o r p u r
 h o o s e a r
 o d e  sl , c  d d
i  . A 
 s k  n
 n  y o  u  r m   se c   a
o   
te d
i  t v e ni  s o  b a
 o n t o t h e  w n t h e  n i y .
i  t e n s t
 T o p a n  y  t
i  g
 li  h  
t y
l  o
 d
 a p p l  n e  n
i
 c o l o r a n d  h e s k  n i  c o l o r t o  t o  s  w t i h  a  li g h  te r  s k 
 f t  v e n
i i  .
 n
 a  t o u c h  o  n  g  a l    e
z   o v e r  t h e  u n  d e  
r  e
n  a  th t h e s k 
 t h e i  g
 n
 Y o u  c a n  
 t  
h e  l
 l
i i  n o f b e
 u s o
 v
i  e
 c o l o r t o g

137
 "THE EMBER HOST"
 PAINT SCHEME
SKIN & MOANS

Dark Skins
 Idrian Flesh
BASE :

SHADE :  Caspian Flesh Wash

HIGHLIGHT :  Kossite Flesh Wash

Ghostly Flame Teeth

BASE: Menoth White Highlight
 ’Jack Bone
BASE :

SHADE :  Bastion Grey

HIGHLIGHT :  Wurm Green
HIGHLIGHT :  Menoth
HIGHLIGHT :  Yellow Ink 
 White Highlight

Wraps Knives
 Midlund Flesh
BASE :
 Pig Iron
BASE :

SHADE :  Deathless Metal

SHADE: Caspian Flesh Wash

HIGHLIGHT:  Kossite Flesh Wash HIGHLIGHT :  Cold Steel

Stitches Flesh
 Thamar Black 
BASE :
 Skorne Red
BASE :

SHADE:  Umbral Umber 

SHADE:  Hammerfall Khaki
HIGHLIGHT: Carnal Pink 
HIGHLIGHT :  ’Jack Bone

Painter's Inspiration -By Dallas Kemp

 When painting my Grymkin force, I knew I wanted to add a bit of
something to the sculpts. I settled on fire, as it would be an opportunity
for me to learn how to sculpt fire while adding a unique twist to my
army’s look. I imagine my force being the harbinger of a dark time
on Caen when Menoth’s gift of Fire is extinguished, stolen and twisted
by the Grymkin, leaving humanity to freeze. For inspiration, I turned
to an old Privateer Press Insider (February 7, 2011) in which sculptor
Brian Dugas discusses sculpting fire. After several failed attempts, I finally
achieved an acceptable level of fire for my models.
Moving on to painting, I used zenithal priming and copious glazing and
washes. This sped up my base layers and created a dark, atmospheric
appearance. I then went over the models with detail work to make them
 pop. For the green flame, I basecoated with Menoth White Highlight
(thanks, Menoth!), then sketched with Wurm Green and Necrotite Green.
Next, I used Yellow Ink to tone down the white and tie the greens
together. Finally, I blended some Thamar Black over the tips. My Ember
Host is now fully prepared to burn up the battlefield!
138
 "THE EMBER HOST"
 PAINT SCHEME
DREAD ROT
Ghostly Flame Pumpkin
BASE: Menoth White Highlight  Menoth White Highlight
BASE :
HIGHLIGHT :  Wurm Green SHADE :  Yellow Ink 
HIGHLIGHT :  Yellow Ink 
SHADE :  Kossite Flesh Wash

Sack Metal
 ’Jack Bone
BASE :  Pig Iron
BASE :

SHADE :  Kossite Flesh Wash SHADE: Deathless Metal

HIGHLIGHT :  Hammerfall Khaki HIGHLIGHT :  Cold Steel

Wraps
Cloth  ’Jack Bone
BASE :

SHADE:  Kossite Flesh Wash

 Exile Blue
BASE :
HIGHLIGHT: Hammerfall Khaki
SHADE : Coal Black 
HIGHLIGHT :  Cygnar

Blue Base

 T I P S
 P A I N T I N G d  ,  k 
 li e  t ha t  fo u nd o
 n
 w  o o
e a pp ea ra  n ce of dead  
e y s  
 t o  y  o u r  b ro w n s.
 Crea te t   h i  g  gr
 
 t
i  
ch w  o o d  tr ee ,  b y add n  o n  G  
re y  m a k es a grea t
 t he  W  
sti
 ld  B  
ro w  n m x i ed w ti h Ba  w t i  h  H  m merfa  ll K ha
a
 k i
 
 Ba  ttle fi e  te x t u re ree n
se  
 la y e  
r .  H i  h li g h t  t he
 g a  w  
ash  o f  Ba  t tledress G d
 b a  o  n Gre y . Use  t he  c o l ors  t o ge  ther a n
 w  t
i  h  B as ti
 m xi ed  tie
 T h  o  
r n  w o o d  Gree n  t o
a nd  .
 o o k 
ea te a  g re  t dead tree l
a
 cr
139
 GOREHOUND
by Dallas Kemp

THE HERETIC
GOREHOUND by Dallas Kemp
by Laine Garrett

CAGE RAGER
by Gabe Waluconis

CAGE RAGER
by Will Shick 

WITCHWOOD
by Richard Anderson

RATTLER PIGGYBACK
by Will Shick  by Geoff Konkel

WITCHWOOD
by Jason Soles

WITCHWOOD
PIGGYBACK by Dallas Kemp
by Stuart Spengler 

140
 LANTERN MAN
& HOLLOWMAN
by Michael Archer  HOLLOWMAN DREAD ROT
by James Arbuthnot by Wendy Vermeers

CAGE RAGER
by Justin Cottom

CAGE RAGER
by Dallas Kemp

RATTLER
by Stuart Spengler  RATTLER
by Dallas Kemp

SKIN & MOANS

by Will Shick 

LORD LONGFELLOW LORD LONGFELLOW

by Dan Roman by Matt Razincka

SKIN & MOANS SKIN & MOANS

by Michael Archer  by Michael Mulligan

141
 VEIL OF  M ISTS
(The Wanderer) 

ARTIFICE OF  D EVIATION
(The Dreamer) 

 You may photocopy these templates for

 your personal and non-commercial use.
 WALL OF  F IRE
(The Heretic) 

BLACK W INGS
(Zevanna Agha, the Fate Keeper) 

BURNING  A SH
(The King of Nothing) 

 You may photocopy these templates for

 your personal and non-commercial use.