Marrowhost Shroudstalker

  The Marrowhost Shroudstalkers serve as the elite of the Bloodherd’s faun archers. Their armour is light and strapped with leather belts that fasten protective steel plates to their chests, thigh, and lower arms. The plate pieces are decorated with thorn woven wreaths.   For melee combat the Shroudstalkers carry spears that are tightly strapped around their backs with leather buckles. In their training drills they are taught to charge ahead at full speed and swap weapons on the fly, which makes them come across as a mad blur on the battlefields. A clever tactic that allows for devastating ambush maneuvers.    

Strengths

 

• Mobility: The Shroudstalkers are harshly drilled to fire accurate shots on the move. Their legs and small sheep-like hooves also make them surprisingly good jumpers, to the point that they can effectively leverage flat walls or enemy shields as springboards. Wall-jumping to both discombobulate their targets and attack from above.
• Poison: To secure kills the Marrowhost scouts use a slow burning poison which causes a combination of necrosis, light paralysis, and excruciating pain within their victims. This also works as a weapon to terrify their enemies and shatter morale.
• Stealth: Shroudstalkers are incredibly good at moving silent and unhindered even in the harshest terrains. This allows them to slip out of combat during the heat of a melee and re-emerge on the flank or behind, within lines of up to a full unit of thirty faun.
• Anti-beasts: As hunters, Marrowhost Shroudstalkers are automatically specialized in felling warbeasts. They already use similar combat doctrines within hunting as they do in warfare, albeit with less destructive toxins to not render the flesh inedible.

 

Weaknesses

 

• Low-Armour: The Shroudstalkers wear little armour to avoid being slowed down during their skirmishes. The downside is that they can be swiftly wiped out by any missile unit if given a clear shot. Especially if they are at a range disadvantage.
• Low-Pierce: With their usage of spears and bows, the Shroudstalkers lack any certain means of countering plate. One famous instance of this weakness at play was the Thornglade Masacree, where a pair of Casteviedan Eliminator’s took out fifteen shroudstalkers and fooled a Bloodherd warband of a hundred to retreat. Simply because even with their perfect ambush, the beastkin weapons could not pierce their armour.
• Mediocre Morale: The Marrowhost are infamous within their herd for being swift to run as soon as the odds turn on them. While their escapes can sometimes turn into tactical retreats that allow strong counter-strikes, it has often led to incidental exposure of covered archer regiments. Which have been completely wiped out seconds later by artillery strikes.

 

Special Abilities

 

• Demonic Metamorphosis: In times of distress, the Marrowhost are known to cannibalize on their own dead to appease the dark forces that they serve. This act causes them to rapidly change into diabolical creatures with hardened hides and an increase of muscle mass, as well as growing lethal claws and teeth. Effective when making last stands, but not much else as it causes them to slowly lose themselves. Nor does it aid their lack of armour piercing.
• Acid Bombs: Some Shroudstalkers carry acid canisters on their person, which they use to melt away the armour of their foes to both break their protection and willpower from the painful but seldom lethal burns. A slight downside to carrying these bombs is that a clean shot or on contact with fire, it may explode, kill the wearer, and damage their nearby hunters.