Drakkisan Wyrmspawn: Hoard of Horrors Gallery and Lore (Patreon)

Every month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The July Battle Pack is the second wave release of the Drakkisan Wyrmspawn, a faction of monstrous beings devoted to increasing the great treasure hoard of their draconic master, no matter the cost!

Become a Patron now and gain access to the Drakkisan Wyrmspawn II: Hoard of Horrors release!

Enjoy this gallery of Drakkisan Wyrmspawn II: Hoard of Horrors miniatures and a glimpse into the lore behind the faction!

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"This is where the Great Ones lie: Not in death, not in slumber, but in waiting. Bound, in dimensions mortal eyes were never meant to perceive. In the unangled spaces between the realms of light and darkness, the Great Old Wyrms make their nests and build their strength. With their earthly aspect gathered to them, they may focus their preceptions and extend their influence into the mortal realm, growing the organs and extrusions that we name their spawn."

-From the scroll 'Of the Slaying of the Serpents of the Outer Darkness and Their Vile Spawn', in the Athenaeum of the Radiant Emperor

The Drakkisan Wyrmspawn are creatures spawned of malevolent alien power, lurking in the darkness of deep caverns and ancient, buried strongholds built and abandoned millennia ago. In these great lairs, by the light of flickering torches and braziers, the Wyrmspawn pile mountains of stolen treasure - rolling hills of gold coins, ingots, jewelry, gemstones, and other things held to be precious by the peoples and races of the world of Jerra. The treasure is taken through violence and marauding, the reptilian Wyrmspawn marching through dark tunnels and hidden passageways that span the world, rising up to invade settlements and raid treasuries, hauling the spoils in sacks and chests back to their great hoard. It is not mere avarice that compels these actions, but the unending hunger of their progenitor, the Great Old Wyrm - Drakkisan.

Drakkisan is a creature of ancient and eldritch power, locked away from the mortal realm by unknowable cosmic tides. Existing in dimensions outside ordinary mortal perception, Drakkisan schemes to slither free of his dimensional prison and revel in the material plane, a god made flesh who will subdue the world entire with his draconic might. Like all his kin, the Great Old Wyrms, Drakkisan is attuned to a particular principle essence, specific to him alone, and only by gathering this essence in vast quantities can Drakkisan's power be made manifest in tangible form. As the Wyrm of Riches, Drakkisan must gather a great hoard of all things that mortals consider to be valuable - gold and jewels and other material wealth.

Drakkisan first began his work by reaching into the dreams of greedy mortals, promising them greater wealth if they would serve his will. As more and more souls fell increasingly under his sway, Drakkisan commanded them to gather their material goods in secret, hidden places, increasing his influence and power. These mortal followers were twisted and mutated by the eldritch Wyrm's might into avatars of the beast, reptilian and cruel. Thus the Wyrmcult, the first of the Wyrmspawn came to be, and with every passing day Drakkisan's hoard, and his power, grew.

As Drakkisan's influence has increased, so to has his ability to manifest his eldritch power in tangible, physical form. Within the hidden fortress-lairs of the Wyrmspawn where Drakkisan's disembodied essence permeates the very air, this power incarnates in the shape of egg-like growths, sprouting in gooey masses from seemingly nothing, like pustules on the flesh of reality. For generations, these fleshy growths have spread and metastasized throughout the underworld, being used by the Wyrmspawn in many ways. Rituals involving devouring the eggs can transform captured or enthralled mortals into more wyrmspawn, and cause new breeds of wyrmspawn to mutate into being. The greater Drakkisan's power becomes, the more ways his flesh and blood are able to manifest in the mortal realm.

His most significant manifestation of the modern age are the Drachons, born not from transformed mortals but hatched from the egg-growths of Drakkisan's own power, the Wyrmspawn closest in nature to the Great Old Wyrm himself. Drakkisan is no longer content to keep to the hidden shadows of the world, but is marshalling his forces to make an all-out assault upon the kingdoms of the mortals and carve out a true and lasting dominion of his own.

Drachons are bred for war, spawned not to skulk and raid but to dominate on the field of battle. Maturing rapidly after hatching, the hulking wyrmspawn are garbed in thick armor and armed with deadly weapons, tempered and molded by dragon-flame. Though limited in intellect to be utterly focused on war and fighting, they are cruely cunning and keenly tactical, more than a match for the enemies they will soon face on the stage of the world. Given independence of thought so they might desire to distinguish themselves in battle, they are nevertheless utterly devoted to their draconic progenitor, and strive with all their force of will to exalt themselves in his service.

As Drakkisan continues to exert his influence and manifest new spawn, his greatest desire, to inhabit a physical form of his own, nears realization. An entity of such vast might as Drakkisan cannot content himself with the tiny fragments of his will that exist in his spawn, innumerable though they may be - he hungers for a singular vessel, a true avatar for his boundless draconic essence. His experiments in crafting just such a vessel have, thus far, not been entirely successful. Yet neither are they entirely failures, for from these experiments have sprung a new strain of hideously potent spawn - the Wyrmwracked.

Marked by hideous deformed shapes and stricken with mismatched and miscreated draconic attributes, the Wyrmwracked and nevertheless powerful instruments in Drakkisan's arsenal. Immune to pain due to their unstable, warping forms, Wyrmwracked spawn can be hurled into battle to devastating effect, the hideous howling spawn wreaking horrific carnage upon the enemy, tearing them apart in a storm of lashing tendrils, tearing claws, bladed wings, and screaming jaws. Stricken with short life-spans due to their unstable nature, Drakkisan thinks little of sacrificing such creatures in any case, and the doomed horrors are expended without much thought or care to weaken or break some potent enemy foe. Drakkisan can always make more.

The designs of the Great Old Wyrm continue unabated. Always and foremost, there is the growing of the Great Hoard. The esoteric principles by which the accumulation of valuable treasure grants Drakkisan increased eldritch might are virtually impossible for mortal minds to understand, but with every coin, ring, and jewel that comes into the miasmic presence of the Great Old Wyrm, Drakkisan becomes more present, more tangible, more real. Ever closer to a true manifestation. Watched over by the Brood-Tenders of the Wyrmcult, egg-growths larger than any previous have begun to grow, the blood-yolk within roiling with the power of Drakkisan. In their slit-pupil gaze, the Wyrmspawn can almost perceive their master in the very air, a cloud of nearly-formless shapes, of scales, talons, leathery wings, and curling, hungry jaws...

Greater horrors will doubtless soon be unleashed upon the world...

Drakkisan is not the only one of his kind. He recalls when he and his kin were still young and nestled together in the First Lair, that primordial space that was not space, in that ancient time that was not time. A realm of abstractions and quantum fractals, where the innumerable Wyrms could not discern where one of them ended and the others began, for no such distinctions existed. They basked in the ever-present heat and light of the Vril, the undifferentiated white hot flame of reality, letting it feed and sustain them, insensate with the bliss of their eternal, unchanging existence. Then, the bright fires of the First Lair guttered and grew cold, and a great darkness welled up amongst the wyrms, splitting them apart forever.

Fleeing the dark, the wyrms slithered through a maddening sea of dimensional currents and fractured realities, until they emerged slick and thrashing into a new realm, a nest of curious inter-weaving dimensional planes that held the world of Jerra at their core. The rough dimensional husk that ensconced the Jerra plane resisted their efforts to pierce it, like thick shell warding against egg-thieves, but from the outer planes they could sense the alluring power of that world. There, the hot fire of the Vril had crystallized into a million different forms, each one a unique and tantalizing flavor to the ravenous wyrms.

Sloughing off the skin of their early primal forms, they grew larger, stronger, becoming old and terrible. Each wyrm, reveling in distinction and individuality, attuned itself to a different aspect of their new existence, a different expression of the Vril - they learned to feed on the Materia essence that arose from matter, the Arc energy of light itself, the Odic force born of the flesh, blood, and soul of living beings. Everything from tangible substance to abstract concepts became their fodder.

Fire, metals, gravity, riches, dreams and time and death itself, all was food for the wyrms. For millennia they gnawed at creation, building the strength they would need to finally crack the shell of their dimensional egg and hatch themselves into the mortal world, in all their ravenous glory.

The veil of reality frays, gnawed by the hunger of the Wyrm of Riches, and his spawn stand ready to herald their master's terrible new dominion. The world of Jerra and everything in it will become part of Drakkisan's Hoard!

For the Great Old Wyrm!

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