Farrow

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This bacon bites back!

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 Gatorman 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 and organs 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.

Come the Infernals Invasion, and the Thornfall Alliance actually succeeded in carving out a chunk of land that Carver, in typical fashion, named "Carversberg", the first farrow nation. He even got Lady Helga to agree to marry him with an eye towards founding the first farrow royal dynasty. Now all that remains to be seen is if Carversberg will survive or if it'll be torn apart by the farrow's own many, many failings.

Whilst the Thornfall Alliance lacks the species diversity of the Blindwater Congregation, it makes up for it in diversity of arsenal. 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).

In WarmaHordes

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.

In D&D

The transition of Iron Kingdoms to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition was pretty sweet for the Farrow! Not only did they get some new mutant farrow subspecies, including the Giant (which, weirdly, is sized as Large just like the regular Brute!) and the Huge-sized, two-headed Biboar, but they even got promoted to playable in the first splatbook, "Borderlands and Beyond", which provides Farrow PC stats and even a complete class writeup of the Bone Grinder!

Statwise, farrow PCs get +2 Constitution and +1 Intelligence, are Medium sized with a base speed of 30 feet, and have the traits Disease Resistant (Advantage on Con saves vs. disease), Heightened Olfactory Senses (Advantage on Perception checks based on smell), Relentless Endurance (stolen from the Half-Orc; 1/day, you can cause an attack that would drop you to 0 HP to leave you at 1 HP instead) and Tusks (when making an Unarmed Strike, you can use your Tusks as a natural weapon, causing the damage to be 1d6 + Str modifier Piercing damage).