Minions

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Whilst Minions is a general term for underlings in common parlance as a whole, here on 1d4chan, we're using it to talk about one of the factions of Warmahordes by Privateer Press. Essentially the Mercenaries analogue for the Hordes line, Minions represent various lesser races of humanoids on Immoren who aren't powerful enough to be a full-fledged army (although eventually that changed, so now you can field all-Minions armies), but instead often get hired as extra muscle by the other beast-focused factions or sometimes even the human factions, since Hordes and Warmachine are cross-compatible that way.

The Minions faction is broken into three subfactions; "True" Minions - units of really minor races or characters who can be taken by other Horde factions as mercenaries, the Blindwater Congregation and the Thornfall Alliance, these latter two subfactions representing once-minor races growing in power amongst the wilderness of Western Immoren. There's a certain degree of overlap; many units or charactres associated with the Congregation and the Alliance can also be taken as mercenaries by the other Hordes forces.

The Minions force debuted in HORDES: Primal Mk II, with new units being added in the HORDES Mk II: Domination, Gargantuans, Exigence and Devastation supplements. If someone on /tg/ is instead referring to the horrible yellow tictac people from Despicable Me in a non-negative fashion, it is considered morally righteous to shoot them in the face.

Blindwater Congregation

The lizardfolk of Immoren take the association of lizardfolk with swamps to their logical conclusion: they're a race of humanoid alligators, locally called "gatormen". Described as a "curious blend of strength and subtlety", gatormen combine the appetites of voracious predators, the stealthy hunting skills and patience skills of their bestial counterparts, and surprisingly high intelligence. Whilst they are capable of forming peaceful relationships with neighboring races, they are violent, bloodthirsty, bear grudges, and fiercely territorial. Males and females are almost impossible to tell apart, and the race is naturally found in small tribes of a handful at least to several dozen adults at most. An adult gatorman stands well over seven feet tall, armored head to tail in thick, horny scales, and supplements its formidable natural armaments of tooth, claw and whipping tail with heavy, two-handed crushing or cleaving weapons. What has kept them from truly leaving a mark on Immoren beyond being swamp-dwelling monsters is that they share the typical lizardfolk weakness of cultural stagnation. Gatormen have been trading, raiding, and hiring out as mercenaries to the other civilizations of Immoren for centuries, but they have never attempted to adopt any of the benefits of their more advanced neighbors. They drag home weapons and loot as trophies and practical goods, but they are content to simply wallow in the muck and live the life of eating or being eaten, like animals.

Of the two Minions subfactions, they are the "Mystical" faction; gatormen society is dominated by bokors who practice a Fantasy Voodoo-esque religion that combines elements of animism, necromancy, Blood Magic and cannibalism into a twisted, toxic whole. The central power of the gatormen religion is Kossk; embodied as a gargantuan alligator, this primal god embodies feasting, reptilian patience, blood thirst, and the hunt. Specific rites, rituals and even precise beliefs about Kossk vary from tribe to tribe, and determined by the tribe's bokor; some of these shamans even believe Kossk is merely the greatest and most powerful of the dark predatory spirits that inhabit the swamp. Bokors can be easily distinguished by their paraphernalia, which abounds in skulls, preserved hides, implements of worked bone, and other totems or talismans made from worthy foes and powerful prey; the idea of metaphysically devouring foes and being strengthened by the act of consumption are key elements of Kossk's faith. Perhaps as a side effect of this religion, or simple bloody-minded instinct, it is the height of disrespect amongst gatormen to consume the flesh of an enemy slain by another; this triggers either an immediate fight to the death or a lasting blood feud.

Whilst the druids of Circle Orboros regard Kossk as merely an avatar of their own Devourer Wurm, gatormen bokors find this ideology very offensive, as the blackclads have often learned to their cost.

The faith of the Congregation even shines through in their sole "war machine"; the Sacral Vault, a holy altar to Kossk designed to harness and store the energies of blood and death released by their grisly rites. The spirits of those offered in sacrifice to the Vault are condemned to serve the bokors tending to it, and in battle they can be released to tear flesh from bone and draw in the spirits of the slain on both sides to strengthen their ranks.

The Congregation also differs from its rivals in the Thornfall Alliance in that it incorporates more races than just the gatormen themselves. Bog Trogs are a race of humanoid fish who also inhabit the swamps of Western Immoren; unfortunately, they are smaller, weaker, and less adept at magic than their reptilian neighbors, and usually end up being pushed around, enslaved, or eaten by them. Even death is no salvation from this suffering, as the gatormen bokors often raise their corpses as expendable zombie minions, called "swamp shamblers". Smarter and less frequently enslaved are the Swamp Gobbers, a marshland-dwelling subrace of the Immoren goblin. More intelligent and technologically advanced than bog trogs (or, in many cases, the gatormen themselves), the swamp gobbers have a less adversarial relationship with the gatormen, and frequently hire out as mercenaries to them or other races. Anura, or "croaks" as they are called, are a strange race of humanoid frogs recently brought to Western Immoren from their homeland of the Shattered Spine islands, which lie south of the Skorne Empire. Poison-skinned, skilled hunters, very lost in the strange new environment they find themselves in, and with a strange religious awe for the gatormen, the Blindwater Congregation has welcomed them into the fold.

For warbeasts, of course, the Blindwater Congregation favors monsters heaved up from their marshy homeland, especially reptiles. The two most frequently used are species of bipedal alligator, possibly degenerate branches of the gatorman family tree; the Snapper is adorned with protective spikes and alternates between a digestive torpor and a hunger-fueled bloody frenzy, whilst the gargantuan Blackhide Wrastler is a gargantuan humanoid gator which can fuel its regeneration by devouring enemy flesh - if this isn't fearsome enough, bokors can also transform them into powerful candle-bedecked undead bodyguards called "Blind Walkers" by ritually murdering and reanimating them. Ironback Spitters, a race of bipedal carnivorous giant turtles with acidic projectile vomit attacks, indiscriminate appetites for flesh, and a temper that even gatormen fear, are also particularly associated with the Congregation. Skilled bokors create strange conglomerate skeleton troopers called, simply, "Boneswarms" to further augment their armies, and the most powerful of all warlocks can bind the aptly named Swamp Horrors - giant tentacled octopus-like beasts that even the gatormen fear - to their service.

The founder of the Blindwater Congregation is the bokor Bloody Barnabas, a centuries-old monster who has achieved something previously unimaginable: to live so long without being cut down by a rival or a greater predator that his body is starting to fail. This is unheard of amongst gatormen, who have never seen one of their kind die a death by old age. And this frightens Barnabas, so much so that he has become obsessed with finding a way to escape the cruelty of destiny: he wants to become a god. To this end, he is trying to forcibly unite all the gatormen of Western Immoren, both to usurp Kossk's place as their racial deity in their culture and to force them into a war of unprecedented bloodshed; a ritual sacrifice on a scale so vast it will fuel a divine apotheosis.

This goal requires an attention to detail that Barnabas has little patience for, which is giving other bokors the chance to try and steal power under his snout - but very carefully, since they risk being tortured to death and eaten if he decides they are traitors! The main threat to his power is another ancient and powerful warlock; Calaban the Grave Walker. This master of mysticism and ritual magic has no intention of giving his life to fuel Barnabas' mad quest. He has more pragmatic goals: he dreams of uniting the gatormen into a true empire, of claiming all the swamps of Western Immoren as their sovereign domain and forcing the other races to recognize them as equals whose territory must be respected. To this end, Barnabas is a useful figurehead around which to rally the race, but eventually, he will have to meet his demise so Calaban can take over.

The lesser characters of the Blindwater Congregation are:

• Wrong Eye & Snapjaw: Those who make the mistake of laughing at the comical-looking figure of the gatorman bokor called Wrong Eye, who adorns himself in scattered human paraphenalia including a battered top hat and monocle, seldom live to regret it. Cunning, intelligent and crazy as a bedbug, Wrong Eye is a powerful necromancer who is obssessed with stealing and harnessing the creative impulse of the mammalian races for himself. A formidable fighter in his own right, his threat is only magnified by the hulking gator-beast called Snapjaw, a loyal blackhider wrastler that obeys Wrong Eye's every command.
• Jaga-Jaga, the Death Charmer: A rare albino gatorman, Jaga-Jaga is a powerful female bokor who has become considered the High Priestess of the Congregation. Descendant of a long line of skilled bokors, she is high in Kossk's favor, and has willingly allied herself with him... although she may have grander visions of her own.
• Rask: A bog trog warlock, Rask betrayed his tribe by selling them into slavery at the claws of the Congregation in exchange for his own personal freedom, even offering to personally subdue rebels amongst his race. For this he has gained an unusual degree of freedom for a bog trog, although the cunning of all races are just waiting for the day he outlives his usefulness.
• Maelok the Dreadbound: Once a powerful and respected bokor of the Bloodsmeath Marsh, Maelok attempted to oppose Barnabas' plans, only to be outwitted, betrayed and murdered by his old rival, Calaban. To heighten the insult, Calaban then used a variant of the Blind Walker ritual to reanimate Maelok as something approaching a gatorman lich. Whilst currently a thrall to his hated rival, Maelok's spirit is slowly growing in power, and one day, he may claw his way back into possession of his own body. After all, he always was the superior necromancer...
• Kwaak Slickspine & Gub: Conjoined twin Anura sorcerers.
• Longchops: A gatorman mercenary who has adopted the human ideology of using guns to hunt monsters.

Thornfall Alliance

Alongside the Trollkin kriels, the humanoid pigs known as the Farrow are competitors for the title of "The Orcs of Immoren". But whilst trollkin more closely resemble the orcs of Warcraft, the farrow more resemble the orcs of Warhammer - in fact, due to Warmahordes' magitek meets steampunk aesthetic, they actually resemble the orks of Warhammer 40,000 more than Games Workshop's actual Orcs & Goblins do, at least on a thematic level! The Farrow are the "Technical" faction, relying on primitive guns and magitek cyborgs to bolster their forces.

Characterized as savage, stupid scavengers, farrow culture is a brutal one in which might makes right and survival is the only imperative that matters. They are a race of thieves and bullies, constantly jockeying for power; every farrow wants to be the top hog, and seeks to simultaneously brutalize those weaker than itself to assert its dominance whilst avoiding the wrath of their superiors. Despite being surrounded by many hostile threats, including the other races of Immoren, the greatest danger to a farrow is another farrow - they constantly slaughter each other over insults, status, or possession of particularly desirable loot. Nobody is quite sure where they came from; some texts suggest they may have been sorcerously engineered, but others attribute them to an unknown creation of the mother-goddess Dhuna or a natural species that simply migrated to Immoren from an unknown homeland. Generally lacking the patience for agriculture, farrow are generally semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and scavengers; a race of brigands and mercenaries who will use or devour everything they can get their hands on, whether that be hunted game or any material left on the battlefield.

Farrow are most numerous in the otherwise unclaimed badlands of Cygnar and along the fringes of the Bloodstone Marches. Several mountain ranges and craggy hill regions shelter farrow villages, including the Dragonspine Peaks, certain sections of the Wyrmwall, and Caerly’s Craig. The Thornwood has been home to farrow villages over the decades, although the present climate makes life difficult there. Migrations have pushed them north out of the warmer and drier regions into unpopulated areas of both Ord and Khador. They have settled as far north as the southern hills of Rhul, but the dwarven clans watching that border periodically drive them away. Even their most remote communities along the Bloodstone Marches have endured competition from the skorne Army of the Western Reaches.

Farrow tribes have a loose hierarchy at best. The weakest and dullest are bullied into doing the distasteful work. The aggressive and skilled warriors and hunters seize positions at the top of the hierarchy, with the most dominant of their ranks becoming the chief. Those skilled at building and crafting fall somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy; the better a farrow is at making something that other farrow wants, the better it can parlay this skill into getting food, and thus the more valuable it is. In its own brutish way, the farrow culture is meritocratic; those who can regularly acquire food or other resources are respected, whilst those who depend on the support of others are objects of scorn and shame. The chief's primary goals are booting the other farrow around so they do what they're supposed to and defending the tribe's established territory. Farrow aren't great builders; their villages are typically made up of ramshackle arrays of wood, clay, mud-covered straw and scavenged sheets of metal hammered together. Still, like the hogs they resemble, they hate to leave any land they have lain claim to, and if they decide to dig in and fight, they're tenacious. Especially because "flight" is considered highly shameful and usually leads to challenge against the former leader.

Unlike their rivals in the Blindwater Congregation, the farrow are not a particularly magically adept race. Shamans practice a simpler tribal variant of the common Dhunian faith, focused on funerals, births and battle-blessings. Bone grinders practice a similar religion to that of the gatormen bokors; a weird blend of druidic animism and necromancy that revolves around using bones as spiritual reservoirs of power and crafting them into totems or grinding them up and mixing them with bodily fluids as the basis for noxious alchemy.

The Thornfall Alliance is new, and is the brainchild of one farrow warlord: Lord Carver, The Bringer of Most Massive Destruction, Esquire, III - a title he half invented himself and half appropriated to make himself sound more grandiose. Possessed of unnaturally high intelligence, Carver has a grand vision of the farrow uniting under his dominion and achieving first equality with and then supremacy over the other races. This goal was only cemented by his brief time acting as a mercenary in his youth; humanity treated him with the same contempt as any other farrow, something that left lifelong wounds in his massive ego. Despite his smarts and equally formidable battle prowess, Carver's dreams seemed doomed to failure, simply because he had to battle not only his many enemies, but the disorganization and laziness of his own followers.

The Thornfall Alliance truly became a reality with the arrival of, ironically, a human arcanist: Dr. Arkadius. Traumatized by the death of his sister due to an untreatable illness in his youth, he had gone into medicine himself, but had become a maverick with his radical new ideas about augmenting and upgrading humanity with drastic surgical modifications and mechanika implants. Eventually, Immoren's answer to Dr. Frankenstein fled polite society into the wilderness to further his grisly research. He had found the farrow to be easy prey, and useful test subjects, but had tired of picking off lone individuals or small tribes. He proposed an alliance with Carver, allowing Carver to use his monstrous creations to better enforce loyalty amongst his followers and to secure greater victory on the battlefield. Though Carver resents his need for the human, and especially the fact that the farrow are growing more afraid of Arkadius than they are of Carver, this alliance has been fruitful indeed, bringing Carver's dreams of farrow domination into apparent reality.

Whilst the Thornfall Alliance lacks the species diversity of the Blindwater Congregation, it makes up for it in diversity of troops. On the battlefield, its mainstay are the humble farrow brigands, who wield crudely salvaged rifles and spiked or bladed clubs, but it supplements their efforts with the magic of bonegrinders and primitive two-farrow rocket-propelled grenade-launcher teams called "razorbacks". Lord Carver's most elite warriors are known as "slaughterhousers", and add even greater punch to the charge, whilst Helga's Valkyries are defensive powerhouses. The hulking and predatory razor boars are herded into battle as expendable cannon fodder, and then there's the farrow's ultimate war machine: the Meat Thresher. This ramshackle pseudo-tank is propelled on blade-strewn metal cylinders, into which sacrificial razor boars are tossed to provide locomotive power; the heat from the crude furnace causes the metal of these cylinders to grow red hot, compelling the pigs inside to race for their lives in a desperate attempt to flee before they are ultimately cooked to death. With a heavy-caliber machine gun of farrow design mounted on top, the Meat Thresher is a truly farrow creation that even Arkadius probably could never have imagined.

A bizarre quirk of the farrow genetics means some farrow are born with prodigious size and strength, but low intellect; the smallest of these ogre-pigs, called "Gun Boars", strap primitive cannons to their backs and act as mobile artillery. It is these super-freak farrow who form the basis of the Alliance's warbeasts, and the condition is not only artificially induced by Dr. Arkadius, but he further refines them by converting them into mechanika cyborgs. The original model of these cyber-farrow is the War Hog, with integrated combat drug dispensers and massive cybernetic arms. Over the years of the Alliance, Arkadius further experiments, creating Road Hogs (outfitted with turbo-charged mechanika legs that let them move at incredible speed, as well as a flamethrower-arm and a crushing mechanical claw), Battle Boars (berserkers granted superhuman strength through integrated combat drug dispensers), and Splatter Boars (Gun Boars with new and improved alchemical shell-launching mortars).

Notable characters amongst the Thornfall Alliance, other than Lord Carver and Dr. Arkadius, consist of:

• Rorsh & Brine: Rorsh is a rare breed; a farrow with the intuitive beast-controlling powers of an Immoren warlock, although he relies on his trusty cleaver, lever-action "pig iron" (farrow rifle) and plenty of dynamite to do his killing. The definition of an opportunistic brigand, his only long-standing ally is Brine; a mindless hulking brute of the same stock that Arkadius normally transforms into War Hogs.
• Maximus: A farrow warlord who made the mistake of attacking a band of Khadoran Greylords who were searching the Marchfells for Orgoth relics. The only survivor, Maximus became a thing of terror when he attacked the Khadoran encampment that night and snatched up a doom reaver's fellblade. It has turned him into a mindless killing machine, tolerated amongst the farrow only because he still retains some instinctive loyal to Lord Carver.
• Helga the Conqueror: A rare female farrow warlord and warlock, Helga shares the same heightened intelligence as Lord Carver - if anything, she may be smarter, for she was succesful in forcing her followers to adopt a more humanlike way of doing things, resulting in unusually disciplined warriors and well-fortified territories. Though she and Lord Carver are on peaceful terms, for Carver sees in her the chance to sire a true dynasty of ruling farrow, she has no wish to give up her autonomy, leading to a tentative political dance.
• Midas: Arguably one of the most powerful bone grinders amongst the farrow, and particularly invested in the aspect of drawing power from consuming flesh as well as bone, Midas was a rising power in the early days of the Thornfall Alliance, and one of the last to be subdued by Lord Carver.
• Targ: Personal assistant to Dr. Arkadius, Targ is hunchbacked and mentally deficient, possibly even autistic. Always prone to fixating on interesting beings and trying to imitate them, Targ was an outcast until his tribe was conquered by the newly unified Carver and Arkadius. The mad doctor found Targ's imitation of his surgical procedures entertaining, and took him under his wing. Ironically, Targ is surprisingly adept at performing basic battlefield surgery after all his time being "trained" by Arkadius.
• Sturm & Drang: Perhaps Dr. Arkadius' most insane and horrifying creation yet, Sturm and Drang is a true monster; a porcine centaur that takes a giant razor boar's body and mounts a patchwork farrow upper torso where it's head should be. Capping the whole thing are the heads of two former farrow champions; the megalomaniacal warlock Sturm and the crazed berserker Drang. Outfitted with mechanika power fists and experimental psychic energy broadcasters, the composite creature is a terror to behold and utterly insane.

Humanoids

Professor Viktor Pendrake: The most legendary naturalist in all of Immoren, Viktor is a student of the many races and monsters of Immoren. His most skilled and devoted students, Lynus Wesselbaum and Edrea Lloryrr, often either join him on the battlefield or take his place.

Saxon Orrik

Lanyssa Ryssyl: A Nyss sorceress.

Dahlia Hallyr

Hutchuck: A powerful ogrun bounty hunter whose immense strength, thick armor and alchemical boosting concoctions make him a formidable foe.

Gudrun the Wanderer

Brun Cragback & Lug: A bad-tempered and surly dwarven mercenary and his surprisingly loyal pet bear.

Alten Ashley

Others

Totem Hunters: Mysterious forest and swamp-hunting humanoids that hunt other races for sport. Basically a Predator knock-off.

Efaarit: A race of hardy tribal nomads native to the Bloodstone Desert whose lives revolve around their belligerent bletcher mounts. Teams of efaarit scouts often hire their lethally accurate and powerful hunting rifles out to the highest bidder.

Thrullgs: Bizarre tentacle-sporting abominations that feed on sorcerous energies, making them natural predators of arcanists and warjacks.

Gremlins: Grymkin with a particular fascination in tearing machinery apart.