$35.00The Umbratouched - December Bundle

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Cursed Immortality Season 2 - (2/4) The Umbratouched - Curse of Vengeance   Description Save money on this complete December Bundle, The Umbratouched, Curse of Vengeance, which contains all the models from the December release! These models come with an unsupported and presupported version. This Bundle contains the following: Madam Wilumbra Yiggral Umbratouched Spritelings Umbratouched Grovestalkers Hexgrove Cauldron (Only included in this bundle) DnD Datasheets DnD CampaignThis release is perfect for your next DnD Campaign! Madam Wilumbra, Yiggral, Spritelings, and the Grovestalkers have all received customized Datasheets to use for 5E! Follow the story below to help you create an exciting campaign for your players! Wargames These models are also great for Wargames! Enhance your druidic armies with treants and evasive wisps! Madam Wilumbra comes on a 60mm BaseYiggral comes on a 105x70mm Oval BaseThe Umbratouched Spritelings come on a 25mm BaseThe Umbratouched Grovestalkers come on a 32mm BaseThe Hexgrove Cauldron is without a base, as it functions more as a terrain piece.  Lore   Madam Wilumbra Long before Wilumbra was a night-stalking, mask-shaping witch, she lived as a druid, tending to wounded forests all over the continent. Many forests had been ravaged in one way or another, be it via wildfires, the woodsman’s axe, or senseless hunts that trampled the ground. Even as a child, she could not bear to see her peers rip leaves from trees to whistle tunes with, or break branches for pretend-swords. For these and other peculiarities, she would soon be adopted by her village’s healer, Madam Gol. Gol was an old woman, grey and bent, but spry as a young tree. She encouraged Wilumbra to follow her instincts on protecting what was dear to her - in moderation - and taught her druidic magicks. Wilumbra eagerly learned all Gol had to teach and could soon harmonize with nature as well as any druid thrice her age. Wilumbra tended to the forests around her home so well that after a while, the forest became sated and had no more need of tending. Instead, Madam Gol encouraged Wilumbra to go out into the world and learn of new forests, new lands, and new faces. Thus began Wilumbra’s journeyman years. She tended to innumerable forests, encountered many druids whom she studied under, and protected countless, human, animal, or plants alike. Every year her powers grew in potency, her knowledge expanded, and when Wilumbra commanded, trees would lend their roots as extensions of her arms, their branches as her hands. Eventually, however, Wilumbra heard a familiar call. The voice of the forest she had once called home became a pained cry in her head, and she rushed home as quickly as she could. The journey took her months, and she always heard her homeland wailing, day and night, awake and asleep. When she finally arrived, she could only find a smoldering forest and her master’s last moments. With her last breaths, Gol imparted her final knowledge on Wilumbra, her power of nature-bonding. Consumed by grief, Wilumbra began the invocation immediately to fulfill Gol’s role. But her natural powers enhanced the ritual, and instead of only permanently feeling nature subconsciously, the forests became extensions of her own body. Every broken branch would hurt her like a broken bone, burning grass became searing agony, and every child plucking flowers felt to Wilumbra like pulling her nails. For years, she could do naught but writhe in pain, hiding in the earth. Eventually, Wilumbra would re-emerge, forced to watch for decades as the people she had once helped trudged through her forests without care, thinking the woods would bow to their own will. Humans consume all in their path. Wilds are tamed, trees felled, brush cleared. Maps are drawn, and with each new generation, the dangers of the forests are forgotten. The stories of the past left untold, the humans sit in their villages getting drunk and fat off the land. But the forest remembers all that transpires within its dark wood. Memories of battles fought by countries long fallen, by kings long slain, all etched within the very soul of the forest. Building until the debt owed to the very forces of nature itself must be paid. The humans have forgotten what happens when the forest is driven to vengeance. Of how the path used to enter the wood suddenly is not behind you, or in front of you. Of the horror when the very earth beneath your feet tenses and bulges with vines growing miraculously fast to bind your feet. Of how cleanly a head can be removed from shoulders when the mighty oak itself swings one of its branches. Oh yes, the humans may have forgotten, but Madam Wilumbra has not. In the time before memory Madam Wilumbra was a simple druid enjoying a peaceful existence among the trees, encouraging growth and beauty from every twig she touched. Flowers bloomed underfoot, and the forest itself communicated its will to her and shared its power in return. But as the humans expanded their settlements and destroyed evermore of her beloved wood, Wilumbra retreated deeper and deeper into the heart of the forest, increasingly consumed by grief and rage. Every fleck of ash falling from the sky of burning timber, every crash of a mighty tree being felled hardened her resolve. She knows what she must do - the forest itself has laid this path before her. Deep in the heart of the wood Madam Wilumbra works her druidic witch magick, twisting the forces of Nature herself into foul creations with one sole purpose: exacting vengeance on the humans and retaking the lands for new growth. Each day she assembles her wooded legions, infusing every branch and vine with the strength needed to take back what is rightfully theirs. Madam Wilumbra places a Mask of Gol, trinkets once made by her old master, onto her every creation, animating and giving new life to the very forest she aims to protect. In those stories long forgotten, humans would speak of the Witch of the Wood. Some loggers would return to settlements telling of glimpses caught of a beautiful woman, seemingly floating on air through impossibly thick foliage. Others would tell of a foul creature with several legs, navigating the trees with naught but the faint crunch of leaves. Indeed, it seems every man that would see her would tell of a different shape. These men were the lucky ones, for a great many others would never see Madam Wilumbra before having their life snuffed out as punishment for entering her wooded domain. The forest does not forgive, and the forest does not forget. Madam Wilumbra's legions are nearing completion, and humanity has long forgotten the might hidden in the wood. The dangers that the foliage masks. The Vengeance coming for them.   Yiggral Part 1: Old Wil In the days before man entered the forest with the sole intent of driving a gain out of even the last patch of unsoiled grass, Wilgrove Wood had been a different sort of place. Where now burned earth is thick with the blood of dead men and thick splinters of bark, mosses, and lichen once flourished. A path now blocked by strangling vines, once inviting a visitor into a secluded spot with a deep pond. There, they would have found Old Wil, a thing so ancient it defied memory. Old Wil, people said, had planted Wilgrove from his own acorns and seedlings. Some went so far as to say Old Wil had a hand in the planting of every forest from here to the oceans. He certainly would have had the time, so old was he that he could not remember his own inception. What he did remember though was his joy at every passing visitor, each bringing a new memory into his old head, replacing one that would soon emerge from his bark in the form of a new memory tree that he would plant. Wilgrove was his home, his soul, his everything. As Old Wil was Wilgrove, Wilgrove was also Old Wil. Of course, this would not last forever. Soon enough, the people forgot about Old Wil and even the stories about him were no longer told. When a war arose many years later, the people sought Wilgrove again – not to protect it, but to harvest it. Trees were chopped down by the thousands, building siege engines and barricades, some turned into thick oaken shields, while their crooked branches were burned to fuel the ravenous forges. And with each fallen tree, Old Wil lost a memory. He became uneasy when he forgot the first tree he had planted. He grew restless when he lost his first meeting with a human. He started knowing anger when he ventured away from his pond and left the forest after a mere two thousand steps instead of the ten thousand it had taken him before. And as he saw unfamiliar people hacking away at the edge of the woods, Old Wil finally learned hate. Part 2: The Ancient Fury When he regained a clear mind, he realized he had killed every last worker in a storm of mighty fists and seething fury. Even so, although he had stopped the men, he had torn down many a tree in his blind rampage and could not even recall his name. As he saw smoke rising at the edge of his view, he began a hunt that would be forever remembered in the songs of bards as „The Forests' Vengeance“. The song leaves out any reference to the name given to the phenomenon of the furious Tree Shepherd at the time: Yiggral, a word meaning “Lost One” in the tongue of the forest-minders. Scholars had theorized that one of the forest-minders always would have to serve as a warning figure. Indeed they might have been correct, if not for the fact that Yiggral had been a creation entirely of his own selfish desire to be more than he was, foregoing his plant-like absentmindedness and filling the omnipresence over his forest with memories he clung to. Memories he could lose. For what does the forest care for a single tree, if there are many more? And why would a forest-minder not realize the extent of what was happening to his woods? In truth, Yiggral had been exiled by the other forest-minders millennia ago for refusing to change his ways, becoming forgetful and lazy. He chose emotional extremes unbecoming of an eternal shepherd and let his forest govern itself, caring little for what he truly had brought forth. Any other forest-minder would have known from the first strike of the axe what was happening to one of his children, but not so Yiggral the Vengeful. At the height of the greatest of battles, Yiggral was felled. A platoon of pyromancers from the temple of Ambus had pledged their arts to the warlord holding control over Riftspan Bridge, a mile-long crossing that connected Riftheight Peninsula to the mainland and had been built from thousands of trees. Yiggral, of course, was drawn to the bridge, furious for every fallen tree he could sense. As the battle raged, the pyromancers enacted their plan to burn up the bridge and Yiggral with it. For this, they had prepared sulfurous traps and ritual circles of black oil. What the pyromancers did not count on, however, was Yiggral's burning hatred driving him to cross the bridge in a final effort and tearing every last one of them to shreds. With the last of his hate spent, Yiggral finally fell into the icy waters and was carried out to sea. Part 3: The new Yiggral With Madam Wilumbra's arrival to Wilgrove, Yiggral was returned. Wilumbra found Wilgrove's oldest surviving trees and sought to recreate the Forests' Vengeance. When her initial attempts only yielded an unmoving wooden colossus, she pondered on the missing ingredient. Days and nights she worked to create an artificial soul or a new form of forest-minder, but none yielded results until she came upon a walking stick of driftwood that a wanderer had left in her forest. She could sense some remnants of identity in them. Flashes of searing pain and unbridled anger reached her mind as she twirled the stick in her many hands. Though the emotion was strong, it did not contain enough power to revive the old Yiggral. Thus, Wilumbra began a long and arduous quest to acquire enough driftwood to create one of her masks. It took months for her agents to acquire enough driftwood this far inland, half a continent away from where Yiggral had fallen, but eventually, she could scrape together enough pieces carrying enough emotion that, with a few touches of her druidic power and a few well-placed runes, a massive creature, reminiscent of a twisted nightmare of Old Wil, and even worse than Old Yiggral, rose from the forest floor. For while Old Wil was flighty and inconsistent, and Old Yiggral was fury incarnate, this new Yiggral held a loathing for all things human, but also a devious, spiteful streak, delighting in petty cruelties and small malices even against his own kind.   Spritelings Children get lost in the woods all the time. Parents grieve, communities mourn, and elders tell stories of the dangers lying in the forest in hopes of preventing more children from wandering off and getting lost.  But what happens to these lost children? The humans assume the worst - either ferocious beasts will have eaten them or the poor things will have succumbed to the inevitable exposure or starvation. Strangely enough,  Madam Wilumbra has a soft spot for these funny little humans.  Perhaps they remind her of herself long, long ago.  Perhaps Mother Nature herself recognizes the innocence of these small ones and bids its servant take them in.  Whatever the reason, Madam Wilumbra rescues these children from certain death and returns them to her secluded grove for protection and care. In time, these children will lose their sense of humanity. Madam Wilumbra teaches them to survive the rough wilds, but food and shelter are not ample. Their frail human bodies fail them, their legs cannot carry them far without rest, their arms not strong enough to swing from branches and through dense underbrush. Sustenance becomes scarce but is abundant for the trees and foliage around them. Left with no other choice, Madam Wilumbra must eventually bestow a Mask of Gol on every child to allow them to survive, but such abilities come at a cost. They must forsake a human body for one made of the forest’s grim mercy. No longer human, these little Umbratouched Spritelings have fused body and spirit with the forest around them, but they have kept their childlike nature. These mischievous creatures leap from tree to tree, sprint through every bush and along every thorn vine, all impossibly fast as if the woods themselves assist their movement.  They fashion crude blow darts and spears to aid in protecting their new home and act as forwarding scouts for Wilumbra’s legions.  It is possible to get a glimpse of these tiny creatures - bright flashes of brilliant green deep in the forest at night. But don’t dare interact with these Spritelings, for they are protectors of their home, and you are not welcome.   Grovestalkers As children tend to do, some of the Spritelings are eventually forced to grow up. But, being created through Masks of Gol, their growth is not time-based. Instead, Spritelings that manage to form strong emotions outside their childish wiles and inherent protective nature can learn to mold their forms in wondrous strange ways. Often, Spritelings run about the forest and spot humans, and attempt to remember their old lives. Some go so far as to approach travelers and follow them for a while, attempting to mimic their speech, their movement, and even their appearance by dressing up in rags they find along the forest floor, remnants of old battles and gifts of yet older wanderers.The travelers approached by such a Spriteling are most often amused at first at the little creature but become annoyed by its chattering. Sometimes they may allow the Spriteling to go with them for a while, treating it like one would a rare animal that had started stalking the wanderers.  If they are versed in magic, these wanderers can sense a remnant of the Spritelings’ old selves and react in horror. No matter the travelers, they ultimately all attempt to rid themselves of the Spritelings through words and even actions.Spritelings rejected in this way become bitter, wanting to redouble their efforts to serve the Woods and chase out those who would not accept them. Even a single cracked twig will have them lash out in the utmost anger their little bodies can muster. After a few such outbursts, the Spritelings’ body will finally give out and the embittered creature will begin the task of molding a new form more to its liking - larger, more dangerous, changeable at its own will, and usually still wearing what little rags the former Spriteling had gathered to impress the wanderers.The newly arisen creature will take to patrolling the woods rigorously and violently chasing out any potential intruders, making sure that not a single leaf is harmed in the process. As more and more humans have come to walk the woods in recent memory, so have the ranks of the Grovestalkers grown exponentially. Many have even taken to splintering their spirit to inhabit further bodies to create a nearly innumerable horde of their numbers. Not for long will the forest watch its desecration idly.   Hexgrove Cauldron Every witch needs a cauldron, and in the very heart of the forest where ancient ley lines intersect deep underground, Madam Wilumbra has laid hers in the hollowed body of an ancient Oak.  Here she works her druidic witch magick, brewing potions and casting spells, ultimately to create her powerful Masks of Gol used to infuse the might of the forest into whoever dons the crude wood mask.  Her magick has leached into the grove around her cauldron and into the tree itself. Birds no longer fly overhead and bugs do not crawl through the earth, but the tree has thrived with Wilumbra’s powerful infusions.  Oh, what powerful amulets could be fashioned from its limbs, its roots! But no mortal has ever laid eyes on the grove, and as long as Madam Wilumbra stalks the woods no mortal ever shall.   Details Get a 40% discount on this model by joining my Patreon! You can also order physical copies at my shop on Only-games!