Cankerfen Boggrots Gallery and Lore (Patreon)

Every month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The September Battle Pack is the Cankerfen Boggrots, a pack of swamp-dwelling goblinoids! This pack includes modular weapons, tons of customization options, giant hungry frogs, and more!

Become a Patron now and gain access to the Cankerfen Boggrots here!

Enjoy this gallery of the Cankerfen Boggrots miniatures and a glimpse into the story behind the faction!

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Don't be daft, man! It's just a bloody swamp. We've got the latest in rough-terrain automatic wagon designs, we'll make it across in jig time. We're nearly behind schedule as it is, and I'm not going to be late on a shipment because we went the long way around a bit of marshland that wasn't even here last season. That's the trouble with folk these days. Too afraid of getting a bit grubby!

-Last recorded words of Vincenzo Corningsfarthem, Senior Caravan Master of the Guildenstern Merchants and Traders Union

Every year, the sprawling swamplands known as the Cankerfen seem to grow a little larger. Every year they creep out more and more into the surrounding wilderness, swallowing up roads and trade routes and even entire small settlements. A dark and dreary bog that stretches across the horizon, it is a place of terrible danger, a beast with a million jaws that swallows up those who dare to enter it. For all its hazards though, there is a race that has made its home there, surviving and even thriving in the hostile marsh.

They love the Cankerfen. And if there's one thing they love even more, it's getting visitors.

Boggrots are a race of grotkin that have made ambush into a way of life. While day to day they subsist off the bounty of the Cankerfen, listlessly fishing or foraging, it is only when word comes of outsiders crossing through their territory that they seem to truly come alive, erupting into an energized frenzy of activity and excitement. Rather than becoming outraged, they welcome such trespasses, joyfully arming themselves with their crude weapons and scampering off through the marsh to intercept the intruders. Once they have located their prey, they track them from the swampy shadows until just the right moment, falling upon them with blade and club and cackling laughter. It's the perfect thing to liven up an otherwise dull day.

Boggrots are a diminutive people, often outmatched in size by other races. To offset this, *ahem*, shortcoming, many of them don long pointed hoods and caps, each one crafted and customized by the individual wearer, attempting to make themselves appear taller than they actually are. A tall, pointy hat is considered a mark of status among boggrot tribes, the taller and pointier the better. Boggrots often attempt various tricks with their hoods, like internal swampwood lattices or small bats tethered to the tip, all to give themselves an edge in pointiness. In many tribes, a boggrot is only considered worthy of joining a raiding party once they've made themselves a suitably pointy hood, and are deemed a proper Hoodlum at that time.

Hoodlums love nothing more than lurking amongst the long grass and fentails of their swampy homes until the target of the latest raid has reached the perfect place to get ambushed. Once travelers have gotten good and lost in the Cankerfen, with the mud sucking at their feet and foundering mounts and vehicles, then on some level all the boggrots just know that the time to attack is now now now! Swarming out of the swamp, the hoodlums stab and bash and slice and chop at everyone and everything that just doesn't belong, not stopping until their targets are good and dead. Unless they fight back a bit too hard, in which case the boggrots take to their heels and vanish back into the swampy darkness from whence they came. At least until they manage to round up a load more boggrots, and the exhausted and wounded outsiders have gone to sleep.

The leaders of boggrot raiding parties are known as Bogblokes. Tougher and scrappier than other boggrots, they've proven themselves strong enough to not even need a very pointy hat, often donning cowls made of bogfrog hide instead. It's not exactly clear what specific role Bogblokes play in what is loosely called boggrot society, as boggrots tend to just do whatever they want whenever they want when not raiding, and don't really take direction during raids either, ignoring whatever contradictory or convoluted orders the Bogblokes happen to be shrieking in favor of viciously hitting the closest target. Given the strange, unspoken coordination boggrots exhibit during their attacks, it doesn't even appear necessary for them to have leaders at all. Still, none can argue that whatever it is the Bogblokes do (or don't do), they are absolutely in charge, by virtue of them clobbering anyone who might say otherwise.

The boggrots are far from the only danger in the Cankerfen, however. It is often said that if the boggrots don't kill you, the frogs will.

And if it's not the frogs, it's the fengators. Or the leeches. Or the giant bats. Or the big lizards that can turn invisible. Or the bugs. Or the fish. Or the other type of lizard that doesn't turn invisible, but is still really big. They'll bite your head right off your body.

Let's see, what else will kill you... oh, sometimes the trees will kill you. Or the carnivorous plants. Or the quicksand.

It would be easier to list what won't kill you in the Cankerfen. The grass, maybe. Some of it. Don't take any chances.

But the frogs are still really bad. They get big.

It would be inaccurate to say that the boggrots tame the Murkmire Bogfrogs. It's more that they've developed a method for semi-reliably aiming them.

Bogfrogs that live past the tadpole stage do so by devouring many of their siblings, and by the time their rear legs have developed they've grown sick of feeding on their own kind, who incidentally rank among the most foul-tasting creatures in the world,  and seek any other flesh to devour.

Boggrots take advantage of the frogs' reluctance to eat one-another by dousing themselves in frog-oil, making the frogs less likely to feed on the grotkin. They then hurl themselves from the branches of cankerwood trees onto the backs of slumbering bogfrogs, rapidly lashing leather straps around them before they fully awaken. Once the outraged frog is roused, the boggrots do their best to steer them in the direction of their latest raid, with the angry boggfrog roaring and hopping furiously to get away from the foul-tasting thing dangling off their backs. For their part, Frogriders hope their mounts will trample and devour more of the enemy than their boggrot brethren, all before the creatures finally get fed up enough to shake the riders lose and take a bite out of them, bad taste or not.

Occasionally, some of the brighter boggrots will discover that words can be an effective weapon against trespassers in the Cankerfen, and a lot safer and easier to use. While their hoodlum fellows will gather to attack at ground level, Scalawags will remain up in the crooked branches out of reach, shrieking and hollering at their enemies from a safe distance. Their capering antics and vulgar insults serve as a potent distraction, drawing the attentions of the enemy at a critical moment, allowing their brethren to strike. It's bad enough dealing with a boggrot twisting a rusty knife in your guts without having another up in the trees insulting your mother at the same time.

While swamplands are not always regarded as the most appealing of natural environments, there are many such regions all across the world of Jerra, pristine marshes and quiet everglades that boast such natural beauty and splendor that any lover of nature would find their spirits lifted to soaring by the bounty of life in all its grandeur.

The Cankerfen is not one of these regions. It is a grungy, miserable hellhole infested with monsters that will eat you alive, and your bones will never be found. Because those will be eaten too.

There is something uniquely unsettling about the Cankerfen, the ever-growing system of bogs and swamplands that the boggrots call home. It is a riot of natural forces, twisted and unwelcoming, hostile to any outside intrusion in countless ways, from the swarms of tiny biting midges and slithering swamp-water leeches, to the boggrots themselves and the bigger leeches, to the great swamp-monsters such as bogfrogs and fengators and the really big leeches, to the tangling roots and crooked branches of the cankerwood trees themselves that reach up to blot out the perpetually fog-shrouded sky.

To the even bigger leeches.

The boggrots say that the Cankerfen is more than just land. It's alive, not just filled with life, but the swamp itself is some vast living thing, and all the creatures living in it are just part of a greater whole, the fangs and claws of a much bigger, hungrier, nastier beast. They personify the swamp as a kind of goddess, calling it Mama Canker, the Old Mother, or Grandmama. They say Mama Canker doesn't care for folk that build big towns or cities or even roads, all the finicky, fancy things that go between a person and the wilderness. Any folk that come to her with such thinking, looking to travel from place to place, or worse coming with plans to drain the swamps or forge a path or clear out the land for building... Grandmama swallows them up, sooner or later.

Bones and all.

Maybe she'll even swallow up the boggrots too, one day...

'til then, well... they're hanging on to life with their nails, laughing all the while.

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