Runehorn Stampede Gallery and Lore (Patreon)

Every month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The March Battle Pack is the Runehorn Stampede, an enlightened race of tauroch who pursue martial arts excellence.

Become a Patron now and gain access to the Runehorn Stampede here! 

Enjoy this gallery of Runehorn Stampede miniatures and a glimpse into the story behind the faction!

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Threefold are the aspects of the living world that form the path we walk - river, sky, and mountain.
Aspire always to these qualities.
Serene as the river.
Majestic as the sky.
Indomitable as the mountain.

-The Threefold Path, by the honored Sage of Three Voices, Maruk Sunmane

In the most remote mountain regions of the world, the tauroch of the Runehorn Stampede live lives of peaceful contemplation, meditation, and training, ever seeking to better themselves in mind, body, and spirit and attain harmony with the world around them. Though mighty in stature and great in physical strength, they shun the path of violence and conquest, and crave only peace.

In a world so full of danger, they do not often find it.

But those who would threaten the harmony they pursue will find the strength to shatter mountains turned upon them and their warmongering ways. For though the Runehorn are peaceful, they are not particularly merciful.

The tauroch are a race of beast-like humanoids that bear the traits of bovid creatures, towering above most humanoid races with bulging muscles, curling horns, and sharp earth-churning hooves. They live in relatively small clan-families known as stampedes, and those of the Runehorn clans tend to adorn themselves with runic markings, painted on skin, worn as stone charms, or carved onto their horns.  Adult clan-members who have attained higher status among the clan even bond metallic runes onto their very flesh in sacred rituals, and experienced warriors can bear many such runes upon their mighty frames. Despite their quite ferocious appearance, the Runehorn Stampede tauroch are rather serene beings, slow to anger and with humble ambitions that rarely bring them into conflict with other races.

The Runehorn dwell in remote mountain-top territories, often far away from the more settled regions of other civilized races, shunning great cities and strongholds for places of high-altitude and cold, bracing winds. Their stone dwellings and monasteries are simple affairs, providing practical shelter from the harshest elements and decorated only with rune-inscribed totems and effigies of guardian spirits that the Runehorn honor. Among the carefully maintained mountain gardens and glacial pools, the Runehorn carry out the daily chores of living, using their leisure time to train themselves in one of many martial art fighting styles, or to simply sit and contemplate the majesty and beauty of the living world around them.

The union between the living world and the tauroch themselves is represented symbolically through the existence of runes, which are the focus on much of their culture. Runes are made of metal taken from deep within their mountain homes, are cooled in the water of glacial rivers, and set under the open sky for many days and nights, all in order to form a bond with these aspects of the world - mountain, river, and sky. In hushed ceremonies, the runes are placed upon the bodies of tauroch, and sacred energies bond the two together inextricably. The tauroch draw power from the living world through the runes, and in turn take on the responsibility to protect the living world as long as they live.

Runehorn tauroch develop and refine innumerable combat techniques in the various monastery-dojos maintained throughout their territory, and clan youths spend much of their early lives on pilgrimages to these various sites to learn at the hooves of honored runemasters. Those who build the strength to crush boulders and the control to cradle a newly opened spring blossom without harming it earn the honor of bonding the sacred runes to their bodies, strengthening their connection to the living world. These students have progressed along their path, and have attained the rank of Stonebreaker, one who is charged with protecting the holdings of their clan from outsiders who would threaten their harmony.

Some tauroch, through a lifetime of meditation and reflection, develop a connection with the living world so powerful that they become extensions of it, embodying its aspects and living as expressions of them. These are the Enlightened, sages who possess tremendous wisdom and mystical power, revered by their people and held up as examples to aspire to. A sage of the Enlightened typically finds themselves drawn to a particular aspect, personifying an element of the threefold path - the Skycall, the Earthsigh, and the Riversong. A rare few attain even greater mastery of multiple disciplines, advancing along the path to become a Sage of the Three Voices.

Riversong Enlightened embody the element of the river, the ever-moving water that brings life and renewal across the living world. They move with a fluid grace beyond any of their kind, seeming to slip from one part of the world to another like the rippling of a stone in a pond. In combat they are an untouchable current, flowing from one target to another, drowning the enemy in blows that unmake them as steadily as waters devouring sand.

Though few hold the Runehorn's mastery of them, the vital energies of the living world that the tauroch harness are known by other races across the world. Called by many names, the most common is the odic force, a mystical energy generated by living beings. Present not just in flesh and blood life, odic force exists throughout the world itself, flowing in esoteric channels like blood through veins, a system often called ley lines. The Runehorn's term for this power is chi, and the channels it flows through are called chakras.

Runes of power are placed where these chakra lines converge, allowing the Runehorn to amplify and focus their own odic energy to a degree no other race can match, and even allowing them to draw on the power of the living world around them to attain awe-inspiring feats. When focused in combat, odic energy manifests visibly as lambent smoke, wreathing the bodies of the Runehorn in glowing light when their runes are most active. Skilled Runehorn can even project odic energy as bolts or beams of pure force, destroying their enemy without even touching them.

Like many of the beast-races of the world of Jerra, the tauroch owe their origins to ancient life-shaping magic once used by the eldarch race during the golden age of their now long-lost civilization. Unlike more unstable and violent beast-races who rose from corrupted, uncontrolled life-shaping magic in the wake of the eldarch's fall, the tauroch were created by the eldarch directly using more stable and pure techniques at the height of their reign. The eldarch in those days saw the creation of entire races foremost as an artistic pursuit, a flaunting of their great power, and the tauorch were one of many races spawned in vanity and then pressed into service in some minor facet of eldarch civilization, little regarded after the novelty of their genesis had evaporated.

In the case of the tauroch, their great strength was used for brute manual labor, something seen as beneath the eldarch or their magical gifts. Cutting stone, hauling timber, harvesting grain, and other such chores were placed on the sturdy shoulders of the tauroch, who accepted their roles with docile grace. The eldarch did not encourage their creations to think for themselves or develop their own culture, but the life-shaping magic that had created the tauroch had also given them a powerful connection to the living world around them, and the tauroch could perceive the beauty of its harmony and the balance of its natural forces in ways that even the haughty eldarch, for all their knowledge and power, were blind to.

The tauroch saw that the great magical feats the eldarch performed to transform the world around them in fantastic ways were distortions of the natural harmony that the world already possessed. Despite the arrogant pride the eldarch took in their achievements, they were in truth discordant notes in a song that was already sublime and beautiful. And even then, the tauroch marveled at how the harmony of the world flowed back into balance, with a new harmony slowly rising out of the chaos the eldarch caused. Even the tauroch themselves had been a new, unnatural distortion of the world's balance introduced by the eldarch, only to be embraced in time and becoming part of a new pattern. In this they were no better or worse than their own makers, ripples in a pond becoming waves only to settle back into tranquility. Despite their humble, even ignominious origins, the tauroch cherished their existence as part of a beautiful greater world, living with a contentment that the prideful eldarch could never hope to attain.

The tauroch freely shared their insights with their eldarch makers even as they continued to labor in their service, living always with grace and serenity. In time some few eldarch even listened, and, with growing wonder and a newfound sense of humility, placed themselves in supplication to their magic-spawned creation, asking to be taught more of this beautiful new way of looking at the world. Such cases sparked outrage throughout eldarch society, and dire circumstances might have befallen the tauroch and their supporters. But before great persecution could be carried out, the eldarch suffered a far greater crisis, for the Age of Hunger began, a time of cataclysm that saw their great golden civilization brought to ruin.

As the world's harmony screamed in anguish under the depredations of the Age of Hunger, the Runehorn truly emerged for the first time, developing the art of crafting physical runes that would help channel the energies of the living world in stable patterns. Great pilgrimages saw the Runehorn travel far and wide, following the chakra lines and inscribing runes of power at key focal points to bolster their vital energies, healing the world and easing the horror that threatened to devour it. Many of the sacred shrines and monasteries where the Runehorn dwell in the modern era are built atop ancient runic sites established long ago. So many centuries later, few can be certain what effect the tauroch's efforts truly had, but in time the darkness of the Age of Hunger receded, and the balance of the world recovered. From these ancient pilgrimages and the practice of rune-crafting came the Runehorn's modern culture, which has persisted throughout millennia to the present age.

The Runehorn continue their contemplation of the living world, dwelling in the glory of its sacred balance, forever on guard against those who would bring disharmony.

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