Strongroot Evergrove 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 Strongroot Evergrove, mighty treefolk protectors of the natural world's balance!

Become a Patron now and gain access to the Strongroot Evergrove release!

Enjoy this gallery of Strongroot Evergrove miniatures and a glimpse into the lore behind the faction!

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"We've secured the extraction camp. The crew is missing, and the extractor has been smashed to pieces. Never seen anything like it. It's as if some giant hand twisted it apart. Must have happened a while ago, the whole camp is heavily overgrown.

The men on watch have reported signs of movement in the trees all night, branches being disturbed, but no sighting of the enemy. I'd dismiss it as just the wind, but there hasn't been any since we arrived. It's eerily calm.

If there is someone out there, they're using the woods for cover like they're a part of them.

I'll send some men out in the morning to cut the forest further back from the camp. I'm not going to let anything surprise us."

-Report of a Sjornbern Commander, Stormcrest Expeditionary Force (lost)

The vast woodlands of the world have always been a source of danger to all who set foot in them, be they uncautious wanderers from civilized realms or experienced explorers who have braved death in the wilderness their entire lives. Great monsters from a primordial era, hostile tribes of marauding beastkin or primitive krog, the unforgiving terrain itself and other, more unspeakable dangers have claimed countless souls. But in the recent era, a new threat has risen to challenge those who seek to master the wilds, a threat that isn't always content to stay in the boundaries of the forests.

They are the trees that walk. The guardians of the grove. They are the Strongroot Evergrove, incarnations of nature's fury, and they are the forest itself. Awake. Aware. Unforgiving. 

While the grovefolk of the Strongroot have only recently revealed themselves to modern nations, they have existed for longer than most realize. Only the eldarch, whose empire once spanned all of Jerra, are aware that such beings have shared that world with other races since time immemorial, slumbering as bodiless spirits in the forested lands found on every continent. It is only the greatest of disasters that can stir these spirits of nature to awaken, a calamity that threatens the natural order.

At such times, the living spirit of the forest, the Evergrove, sings the silent song of war and calls forth its mighty legions, numberless as leaves in a forest. The grovefolk appear as humanoid beings made of bark and vine rather than flesh and blood, their dense wooden hide as strong as any armor forged of metal, their weapons made from the same living treestuff as their own bodies. When the armies of the Evergrove answer the warsong, it's as if the very forest has uprooted itself and begun to move. With the slow, steady patience of a growing oak tree, the Evergrove make their way to the source of the disturbance, and erase its existence from the world. Even should their wooden vessels be destroyed by violence, the spirit within will endure, returning to the embrace of the Evergrove to renew its strength until a new vessel is grown and it can return to physicality once again.

The earliest defenders of nature to answer the song of the Evergrove are the Groveguard, younger spirits restless and filled with energy, eager to take on forms that will allow them to move and fight. The Evergrove has learned well the means by which mortal armies wage war, having devoured the bodies of the slain left to decay in countless forested battlefields over the course of millennia. Taken in by dirt and root, this knowledge is distilled by the great spirit of the woodlands and imparted to the Groveguard, making them highly effective warriors from the first moment their wooden limbs began to creak with movement.

Lacking the patience of elder spirits, they are even capable of conversing with most mortal races, the slow bassy song of their voice able to form words much faster than older grovefolk, who can spend days singing a simple greeting to one-another.

The older and mightier the spirit of the wilds, the longer it takes to inhabit a vessel suitable to contain its essence, producing a much larger grovefolk as a result. These beings are known as the Oldgrowth, the elder generations of the Evergrove's great family. Towering over the younger manifestations, they bring to bear greater strength and resilience against the Evergrove's enemies. Boughbreakers shake the forest floor underfoot with their marching, their immense bodies capable of enduring tremendous punishment before they suffer the slightest discomfort, their mighty weapons hewing apart entire ranks of the enemy with a single sweep. Sometimes, Mother Nature is truly without mercy.

The power of the Evergrove is most heavily concentrated in the deepest and most remote forested wilderness, far from lands that mortals have molded and remade with their reviled practices of agriculture and industry. In forbidden groves that have never known the efforts of mortals to twist nature to their whims, the Holtwatchers reside, ancient spirits that sing memories of the oldest ages of Jerra, when the first leaves drank in the life-giving radiance of a younger sun, and the world resonated with the first notes of the lifesong.

When the Evergrove calls one of these ancients to war, it manifests in a truly monumental form, casting the battlefield into darkness beneath its branches. Their form bears the implacable power of nature itself, and like a slow-growing root gradually splitting apart a stone, when faced with an enemy they slowly and steadily rip it apart.

While many treefolk rely on raw strength in combat, the Evergrove is no novice when it comes to employing more exotics means. If the situtation calls for sorcery, the Evergrove calls for the Brightholt, an order of spirits that can manipulate the mystical forces that wreathe the world. Magic, as with all things, is born of the Vril, the secret energy that forms reality itself. To wield the Vril and remake reality is the very essence of magic - the ability to change objective reality through force of subjective will.

The magic employed by the Brightholt manipulates what is known as Odic Force, an energy born of all life. While mortals may focus on the odic energy, sometimes called Chi, contained within their own fleshy bodies, plantlife also contains odic force, and vast quantities of odic essence flow like ocean currents through the forests of the world, a near boundless source of energy for the magic of the Brightholt. Channeling this energy, Brightholt spirits can reinvigorate their comrades, healing any damage to their forms and spurring them to greater dynamism. Other spirits can weave illusions to fool the meat-senses of the enemy, befuddling them with enchantments and leaving them easy prey.

The odic force is more than a simple tool to be employed by certain sorcerous grovefolk. Indeed, the Evergrove itself is the greatest wielder of this power, and it is by the mass manipulation of odic force that the grovefolk are able to manifest and maneuver their tree-vessels. It is the preservation of this vital energy that wreathes the world of Jerra, sustaining and sustained by all living things, that spurs the Evergrove to sing the warsong and summon its legions to eradicate anything that may threaten this wellspring.

The last time the warsong was sounded was nearly one hundred thousand years ago, in an era of cataclysm that brought low the golden age of the eldarch race, a time known as the Age of Hunger. All the world groaned in pain under the pall of that terrible, toxic age, and the armies of the Evergrove marched in numberless legions unseen before, fighting against the architects of that apocalypse. They marched and they burned and they died, their very spirits extinguished by unnatural poisonous forces,  the song of the Evergrove turning from a raging anthem of war to a mournful dirge. Only desperate sacrifice and supreme effort prevented the Evergrove itself from being extinguished and enabled Jerra itself to survive, saving the song of the world from final silence. Eons passed as the Evergrove slept and healed, recovering from the cataclysm.

While the Evergrove has remained silent for untold millennia, its song has rung out in the modern era, stirring its armies to manifest. The balance of the world is threatened by the growing power of mortal races, by their incursions into sacred lands in search of resources, and the growing pervasiveness of their industry and sorcery. Forests are cleared to build cities, the land is reshaped to subdue and replace natural splendor with civilization, and magical arts bend and pervert the world's balance. The mystical energies that sustain the land are being tapped and drained at ever-increasing rates to fuel profane technologies, and the ambitions of power-hungry magisters.

The Vril that flows through the world is eternally renewed by the rhythms of the cosmos, and if managed carefully could be a potentially endless source of power, benefitting all life. But the growing mortal thirst for Vril is taking too much, too rapidly, and this reckless exploitation threatens everything. Abuse of natural energies has even birthed a twisted perversion of the Evergrove itself, a hungry cancer poised to usurp its role in the natural cycle. Jerra teeters on the brink of another age of cataclysm, one from which the world may not recover a second time.

The Evergrove remembers that dark age. It has reflected on its losses for millennia, growing, learning, planning, preparing. It will not allow another such disaster to befall the world again.

The Strongroot Evergrove march to the song of war. Their enemies shall fall, like leaves in autumn, and nourish the soil for new growth to come.

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