The Lore of Rivenstone Part VI: The Wild

The Lore of Rivenstone Part VI: The Wild

Welcome to the sixth and final installment of our introductory Rivenstone lore series. These blogs are meant to introduce you to the world of Rivenstone and the warring factions that you, as the player, will be able to take command of in this upcoming miniature wargame. If you’re just joining us, be sure to read our previous lore posts: Part IPart IIPart IIIPart IV, and Part V.

This post is going to be a bit different and a bit shorter than the previous ones we posted, due to the unique nature of the faction we’re covering. In summary, there isn’t a central unifying lore that describes the history of the Wild faction.

The Wild faction is a potpourri of creatures, individuals, and entities that do not fit neatly into the established social and/or military hierarchy of Venn’s kingdoms and nations. We knew very early on in the development of Rivenstone that we wanted a home for ideas that weren’t traditional soldiers or mages. We needed a place for the giant mutant spiders, the raging elementals, the mad mercenaries, and the dragons to live. 

A core element of Rivenstone’s narrative is that the wilderness, transmuted as it was by the 400-year rivenstorm, is an unimaginably dangerous place filled with strange threats. Only the Orrix survived the full brunt of the rivenstorm in the wilds, and only by taming the beasts that evolved out of the arcane calamity. 

The Wild faction is meant to represent the myriad threats that exist in the wilderness of Venn. It is also a unique faction from the others we’ve covered previously in that for any given release cycle of models for the game, Wild may receive more or less new releases than the other factions. It really just depends on what crazy monster we want to introduce to the world at that time.

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Terrestrial Fiend

Above is an illustration of a Terrestrial Fiend, one of the Wild heroes that you will see in miniature form as part of our game. Fiends are anomalies of wild magic, complete freak accidents that are a testament to the unpredictable nature of rivenstone.

Rivenstone deposits do not often grow too close to one another, but this phenomenon is not completely unheard of. When so much pure concentrated magic grows within a tight cluster, the results are absolutely unpredictable. One such result of this mini-disaster is that the environment around the rivenstone cluster will gain a sort of animalistic sentience and spring to “life”. 

This elemental being is known as a Terrestrial Fiend, a walking calamity that exists only to cause mayhem and destruction. Every Fiend is unique, as they are quite literally products of their environment. No matter the material composition of a Fiend, each of them is a deadly threat that any sane explorer would avoid at all costs.

A Fiend “breathes” pure magic in great plumes as it enters battle. This warping mystic force causes battlefield terrain to twist and mutate, temporarily animating to crush any threats to the Fiend. Of course, for those poor souls that are directly struck by the rivenbreath of the Fiend, the end result is often complete molecular disintegration. 

Worst of all, damaging the Fiend only causes smaller bits of it to break off from the greater whole. If any of these smaller bits should contain a chunk of rivenstone, they are likely to animate themselves into creatures known as Terrestrial Imps. Far too many brave warriors have amputated a Fiend’s arm, only to have that arm stand back up and strangle them to death.

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Coming Up

We still have loads of lore to cover in the future, but starting with the next blog we’re going to be taking a closer look at some of the gameplay aspects of Rivenstone. We felt it was important that we set the tone of the game’s narrative, and introduced everyone to the story behind the models before we explained how those models will be played.

In upcoming lore blogs, we will introduce you to the greater world of Venn and cover some of the strange environments you can expect to utilize as your battlefields. Additionally, while we’ve covered the primary warring nations of Rivenstone, the world has many more “NPC Kingdoms” populating it. Some of these fractured societies are peaceful, wanting nothing more than to exist in the post-rivenstorm world without turmoil or violence. Many others, however, are places just as deadly as the homelands of the Shattered Empire or the Orrix; the only difference being that these NPC kingdoms and the playable factions are, for the most part, not sending warbands abroad in search of rivenstone, and thus aren’t fighting tooth-and-nail in the deadly wilds of Venn. 

Thank you for joining us for the lore of Rivenstone. We hope you come back for the first installment of the gameplay series beginning soon!