Plagueheart Defilers Gallery and Lore (Patreon)

Every month Battle Yak Miniatures will release a new Battle Pack, featuring 3D printable miniature files! The January Battle Pack is the Plagueheart Defilers, monstrous plague demons spreading their infernal contagions into the mortal realm!

Become a Patron now and gain access to the Plagueheart Defilers release!

Enjoy this gallery of Plagueheart Defilers miniatures and a glimpse into the lore behind the faction!

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"The makers locked us away to forget about us.
Did they imagine we would forget about them?"
-Carved into stone at the gateway to the Second Kingdom

Reality itself rots and crumbles as the Plagueheart Defilers invade, bursting forth into the mortal universe from their own infernal domain. These demonic harbingers of sickness and disease spread their contagions like wildfire through hapless mortal populations, reaping a toll of death through disease as great or greater than the toll they take with their lethal weapons. Glutted on the feast of vital force from stricken mortal life, the Defilers make their way back into their infernal kingdom, where the stolen energies are used to bring diabolical new plagues and new demons into foul being. This is the endless epidemial cycle of the Plagueheart, a blight upon existence itself.

Demons are creatures that are as much living magic as ordinary flesh and blood. Like mortals they are born, age, and die, but unlike mortals they can transcend the limitations of physical life and grow increasingly stronger over time, provided they can find and consume the magical energies necessary to fuel this growth. The demons that make up the ranks of the Plagueheart Defilers are no exception, and the craving for vital energy to feed their endlessly evolving plagues is an ever-gnawing presence in their lives.

What all demons crave is the living magic of the cosmos, the power called vril, which is denied to them in their own realm. Thus, the demons seek to steal this living power from mortals and their worlds, where vril can be found in abundance. With a sufficient supply of living magic, demons can not only prolong their own lifespans indefinitely, but even empower and evolve their physical forms, transforming into ever-more monstrous and powerful shapes. Provided they are able to feed on enough living energy, there is theoretically no limit to how long a demon can live or how powerful they can grow.

The demon races came into existence eons ago, in a mysterious act of cosmic miscreation. Inadvertedly given life by higher beings of unimaginable power, the first demons served their makers with zealous devotion, seeking to prove themselves worthy of their existence. They acted as the sculpting tools of their creators, destroying anything that threatened the grand design of the cosmos taking shape. From eldritch horrors infesting the darkness between the stars to rebellious species seeking to overthrow the cosmic order, the demons were the proud blades of their creators, carving the universe into its proper shape.

The demons discovered their capacity to consume the cosmic essence of vril and thereby empower and evolve themselves, using this trait to overcome whatever challenge they met. They came to regard their evolution as a mark of greatness, striving to push it ever-further, accepting no limits on their growth. The ancestors of the demons that would become the Plagueheart Defilers embraced the ideology of plague and pestilence, adopting the nature of the ever-changing and adapting virus and emulating it's ability to grow, evolve, and overcome any challenge.

In time, the very higher beings who had created them came to view the demons themselves as a danger to the cosmos they were crafting so fervently. The demons ability to evolve gave them limitless potential, and their numbers continued to increase while the potential threats they were employed against had nearly all been neutralized. The creators foresaw a time when the demons would multiply unchecked and devour the very cosmos they had fought to claim, all to fuel their obsessive evolution. The creators decreed that the time of the demons usefulness was at an end, and they conferred on how best to deal with their servants.

In the end, the demons were consigned to exile within a series of dimensional pockets that had previously been used to imprison many of the very same threats that the demons had defeated and captured in ages past - the Dungeon Dimensions. The demons were told that they were to be given the duty of jailers over these cosmic prisoners, and at first they took to the task with their customary zeal. Over the eons however, the demon hordes began to chafe at their duty, then outright suffer as their reserves of vril essence ebbed and their evolution stagnated. The Dungeon Dimensions were cut off from the true cosmos, and there was no ever-present wellspring of vril essence to sustain demonkind. When the demon leaders attempted to leave and bring their grievances to their masters, they discovered that they were unable to do so - they had been locked within the prison dimensions, the jailers now the jailed.

Shock gave way to sorrow, then bitterness, and finally outrage at the injustice of their imprisonment. The creators they had served so faithfully had betrayed them, spat upon their loyal service, and consigned them to an existence of gnawing hunger, stagnation, and dissolution. With no way to bring their wrath upon their creators, the demons turned first upon their prisoners, and then upon each other. Eons of civil war turned the Dungeon Dimensions into a shattered expanse of sub-dimensional wastelands, the fabric of reality in these prison realms twisted and poisoned by the powers the demons unleashed upon one-another.

In time, brutal new hierarchies emerged from the chaos, and powerful demon monarchs came to rule over many kingdoms, each one monstrous and bizarre as the demon bloodlines consumed one-another and evolved into ever more terrible forms. The monarchs understood that their infighting would ultimately exhaust the last dregs of horded energy they possessed, and they would be doomed to dissolution. Instead, they turned their efforts to breaching the barriers of the Dungeon Dimensions and returning to the true cosmos, where they could feast upon the bounty of vril once again and push their evolution to ever-greater heights. The cosmos they had won for their unworthy makers would be theirs, to be harvested for their own advancement and ruled however they wished.

By dissecting the minds and souls of their ancient prisoners, the demon monarchs gleaned forbidden knowledge and employed it to breach the dimensional barriers ensconcing their prison. They learned to form rifts in reality that allowed armies of demons to surge out into the cosmos and pillage living worlds for energy, but discovered that in time the rifts would inevitably heal, and no matter where in the cosmos the demons were they would be pulled back to the Dungeon Dimensions, fading from reality like phantoms to find themselves trapped once again. Bound to their prison on a fundamental level by their creators, they would not escape it easily. The demon monarchs vowed that no matter how long it took, they would reave the worlds of the cosmos to sustain themselves until they discovered the means to permanently shatter the cage of the Dungeon Dimensions, and release all of their kind once and for all.

The Plagueheart Defilers have rotted through the walls of reality itself, and all mortal life is theirs to desecrate. Prepare to be plagued!

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