The Kingdom of Nadaren stands as Terra’s premier industrial power, abandoning arcane tradition for metallurgy, assembly lines, and chemical propellant. Nadaren’s line infantry march in disciplined regiments designed to maintain continuous fire using bolt-action rifles with internal box magazines. These weapons allow soldiers to reload rapidly from any position. Every rifle carries a long bayonet, converting the firearm into a thrusting spear for melee combat or trench clearing.
Nadaren soldiers wear light armor: reinforced leather pauldrons, high-collared tunics, and heavy canvas fatigues that protect against shrapnel, glancing blows, and severe weather without restricting mobility. On winter campaigns, regiments don thick, double-breasted woolen heavy coats treated to repel rain and mud while preserving body heat.
Beyond regular army ranks, small arms proliferate throughout Nadaren territory. Travelers, adventurers, and seafarers regularly carry revolvers utilizing rotating cylinders and metallic cartridges for reliable, rapid-fire personal defense. On the battlefield, Nadaren deploys batteries of rifled field cannons. Cast from high-tensile steel, these cannons fire standardized explosive shells, shrapnel canisters, and solid shot to smash enemy fortifications and formations long before hand-to-hand combat occurs.
Faced with Nadaren’s expansion, neighboring human realms formed a defensive alliance. Lacking Nadaren's massive steel foundries, the Alliance merges traditional martial structures with strategic technological upgrades.
The Alliance frontline features heavy infantry equipped with iron or steel breastplates, heater shields, and arming swords or spears to hold ground and absorb charges. Positioned directly behind this line are massed regiments of crossbowmen. While slower to reload than bolt-action rifles, cranked heavy crossbows are inexpensive to maintain across multi-national supply lines and launch bolts capable of piercing leather and denting plate at medium range.
Bolt-action rifles remain limited in the Alliance, reserved for elite sharpshooters rather than line infantry. Operating as skirmishers, these marksmen target enemy officers, artillery crews, and vanguard commanders to disrupt Nadaren's rigid battle plans.
The subterranean Dverga are split between traditionalist clans and industrialist enclaves, reflecting two distinct military doctrines.
Traditionalist Dverga field heavy infantry clad in full-plate armor forged from mountain alloys. Armed with tower shields and broad battleaxes, they form an unyielding wall supported by mechanical windlass-cranked crossbows firing dense steel quarrels that crush armor through kinetic weight.
Conversely, industrialist Dverga discard heavy plate for flexible leather coats reinforced with internal steel scales. They carry high-caliber rifles designed for high-pressure rounds alongside advanced alchemical munitions. Their rifles and mortars fire incendiary shells, cloud-producing chemical canisters, and armor-dissolving payloads, transforming subterranean choke points into deadly traps.
Disdaining black powder smoke as crude and cowardly, the Ljosalfar rely on strict martial discipline, elemental magic, and divine energy.
Ljosalfar phalanxes deploy with gleaming radiant tower shields enchanted to emit blinding flashes during charges. Behind this shield wall, soldiers wield bronze-tipped spears and curved longswords forged for precise, fluid maneuvers. Ranged support comes from arc-bows—composite bows infused with crystal catalysts that shoot arrows wrapped in crackling lightning or raw solar light.
Ljosalfar formations integrate battle-mages directly into their ranks. Fire mages erect cascading barriers of flame to stall cavalry, light mages weave illusions and blinding bursts to disrupt enemy marksmen, and sky mages strike mechanical artillery with directed lightning.
The tribal confederation of the Wild Blood Host eschews factories and chemical weapons, relying on physical power, ancestral magic, and environmental control.
Warriors enter battle wielding traditional weapons of iron, bone, and dense hardwood—including battleaxes, broadswords, hunting bows, and wooden or hide-bound shields. They compensate for shorter engagement ranges with physical aggression, speed, and mastery of rough terrain.
The Host’s strategic weight lies in its spiritual casters. God-callers channel earth magic to raise stone ramparts against cannon fire, create mud pits to trap advancing infantry, or open chasms beneath supply lines. Simultaneously, hex-weavers unleash voodoo rituals and ancestral curses to afflict enemy ranks with sudden terror, physical weakness, or rot.
Defending their deep woodlands, the Vioalfar avoid open battles, relying on environmental control, stealth, and lethal archery.
Vioalfar spellcasters conjure dense, unnatural mists and fogs across the canopy floor. These mists dampen black powder, obscure sightlines, muffle sound, and reduce visibility, leaving rifle formations and artillery blind and disorganized.
Operating seamlessly within the fog, Vioalfar archers strike from high perimeters and dense brush using silent wooden longbows tipped with broadheads or sleeping toxins. They favor rapid hit-and-run tactics—striking a flank, dissolving into the mist, and re-emerging behind enemy lines.
Deep within the subterranean Obsidian Underreach, the Dokkalfar conduct warfare based on absolute pragmatism, stealth, and lethal efficiency, rejecting surface notions of martial honor.
Operating in complete darkness, Dokkalfar skirmishers use lightweight swords paired with spring-loaded wrist blades concealed beneath their sleeves for instant close-quarters assassination. To avoid giving away their positions with loud black powder, they deploy silent, repeating clockwork crossbows fed from compact magazines and thrown darts.
Every piece of Dokkalfar ammunition is coated in fast-acting subterranean poisons—ranging from paralytics to necrotizing agents—ensuring even minor scratches prove fatal. Dokkalfar dark mages support these attacks by severing light sources, extinguishing lanterns, freezing steam boilers with ice spells, and manipulating shadows to strangle sentries.
The lethal efficiency of Dokkalfar doctrine was demonstrated during Nadaren's Second Expedition into the Underreach, an event remembered as The Night of Pallid Shadows.
Seeking rich subterranean mineral deposits, Nadaren sent twelve hundred soldiers equipped with bolt-action rifles, bayonets, pneumatic drills, black powder, and light field cannons into the abyss. After five days of noisy industrial expansion, the Dokkalfar struck under cover of thermal vent mist.
Dokkalfar mages severed the wiring of Nadaren's arc lamps, plunging the camp into light-smothering darkness, while punctured steam lines filled choke points with blinding clouds. Volleys of poisoned bolts from silent repeating mechanical crossbows rained down from above. Blade dancers moved through the ranks, bypassing bayonets to cut through entire squads with blurring speed and poisoned blades. Meanwhile, the dark mages erupted obsidian spikes through supply wagons and redirected volcanic gas into barracks.
Nadaren's rifle volleys were useless in the dark, illuminating only the bloody, fallen bodies of fellow soldiers. Out of twelve hundred men who marched into the Underreach, barely a dozen traumatized survivors escaped back to the surface, proving that massed black powder and steel mean little in the lightless domain of the Dokkalfar.